I'm Dying Laughing (9 page)

‘What about Grandma? What about this gorilla you met on the boat, McCoy?’

‘Well, hooray, thanks. I’ll put him in a story. McRoy.’

But her story about a tough nut in the hometown, with hard fists who fought for Sacco and Vanzetti and Karl Marx did not come off. Stephen was right: it had no takers.

She said, ‘Your advice is good: you’re outside it. I’m just an eager Toonerville expatriate with glory in her eyes, a high school learner.’

They spent all they had settling in and then they ran up bills. Anna Howard was generous. She gave them family silver, linen, a linen chest from the Chicago house. She made loans to her son, kept an account, reminded him of his indebtedness when he borrowed more, remarked thoughtfully to each of them occasionally on the duty of man to money, but never asked for money back. It was being charged against his estate and was his affair. She only regretted with a felt sadness, at times, that others had the money and no doubt were making it bear fruit.

‘Money is not a tree,’ said Emily, ‘it does not bear fruit. The only way to make money is to earn it in a big way; get it out of them—I would never scrooge it.’

‘Scrooge or be scrooged,’ said Stephen.

Anna married Arthur Winegarden and made a settlement on him. He also did not care for fruit-bearing money; though he had his own insurance business, which he ran from an office in her house on 75th Street, New York.

Her heirs were Stephen, his older sister Florence, his younger sister Brenda; and a portion each for Olivia, Stephen’s daughter now aged nearly three, and Christopher Potter, Brenda’s son, now five years old. Christopher’s father, Jacob, a man of no estate, a soft, dark, pliable man, collected old music, composers’ manuscripts, and had looked to his wife Brenda to give him money for his hobby. She gave him music for each anniversary; but the Howards, Brenda too, believed in work. She herself did social work with Anna. They made Jake Potter manager of a fashionable Howard hotel in the Adirondacks. He worked at it obligingly, unwillingly. He felt like a rich boy done out of his rights. Uncle Howard Howard owned the hotel and was a difficult character. He was persistent, rancorous, never forgave. He had once married a famous dancer and when she left him for another dancer, he persecuted the couple, trying to deprive them of work; and in the end he succeeded. So that the gentle Jake had trouble with Uncle Howard. Anna constantly praised Jake to cheer him and also because he was her son-in-law. She believed in family loyalty. She explained to Jake the duty of man to money; but anyone could see it—he worked like a fly struggling through treacle; and he had to stop for a breather, he had to sup treacle sometimes. The hotel was full of liquor; the clients were spenders. Jake began to drink and got to be a two-bottle man, a bottle of gin, a bottle of whisky daily. He would sit nodding in the lounge with the radio on and a bottle at hand, fall asleep, sometimes spend the night in the easy chair. His wife Brenda had begun to spend time away from the hotel. She visited her mother and her sister Florence in New York.

Anna had now bought two of the houses she wanted on the other side of 75th Street and Florence had rented part of one from her. The top two floors were let to strangers.

Florence was a tall, handsome, bony-faced woman built like Anna, with dark hair and grey eyes. She now had poor health and was often in bed. She lived with a lover, Paul, a sculptor, who used her as a model; an energetic man who was away half the time either at the studio he patronised on 48th Street, where he had space, advice and models, or organising exhibitions for other artists or for the Left.

Florence’s apartment, reconstructed by Anna for her, consisted of a sort of studio with bedrooms on a balcony overlooking a large living-room, and under the balcony, a dining recess, the kitchen, bathroom and on the other side a sitting-room. A gilt corkscrew stairway led up from the living-room where Florence held her parties, to the balcony. Above it dangled two gilt cupids. The staircase was in a sort of open chimney, papered to resemble a green canebrake. Along the balcony ran a frail gilt railing. When Florence was out of sorts, she could survey her parties, even if she could not attend them, through her open door or from the balcony. When she was ill, Anna came over every day to look after her.

Anna and Florence had to discuss Olivia’s future. Florence’s apartment was too small for the child and her nanny. Since Florence had moved to this house, Olivia and her nurse had been lodged at Anna’s. If Emily and Stephen could be persuaded to move to the neighbouring house in 75th Street, Anna thought Olivia could live with her father; it would be simpler. Anna herself went abroad often and she now proposed to travel with her new husband, Arthur, an amateur archaeologist, who, every year or so, went on digs. Besides, though she did not complain, the nanny did not belong to her staff; she felt her to be a supernumerary, too much in presence: and the staff disliked her.

‘Even if you had room,’ said Anna to Florence, “there are all these parties. I thought when you moved up here you might do less. I was thinking of your health.’

They are my life, it’s my contribution,’ said Florence. ‘It’s what I do for the Party and it keeps me in touch. I quite see that Olivia can’t stay permanently with you. Then if she lived next door, I could see her every day. There really is not room for her here, with Paul here.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ murmured Anna. She had arranged the move, in fact, so that Olivia would not live in an irregular household. Uncle Howard Howard was discontented and he did not like Florence’s political views, but Anna said nothing of this.

Anna went down the narrow staircase to get some light lunch for Florence in the kitchen, a mere closet that had no daylight. When she returned, climbing the stairs with difficulty, with the tray, she meditated, ‘Emily loves her home; she is a homemaker. Caroline didn’t care for housekeeping at all; they ate out.’

‘Hamburgers in diners,’ said Florence, ‘no wonder Stephen has stomach trouble.’

‘He was a sick baby,’ said his mother; ‘and he starved himself in college to keep within his allowance. He has will-power. I did not realise—the consequences. The only thing is, I wish they would have a plainer diet. If Olivia went to stay with them, of course, she would have her own planned meals.’

But when Florence found out, as she did through Brenda, that Uncle Howard was behind Anna’s manoeuvre and that the idea was to protect Olivia from crackbrain ideas, she became indignant and hard to persuade. Caroline had given Olivia into her care. She needed Olivia to love and guide; and her hope was to bring Olivia up as a communist, so that their part of the Howard fortune, all of which she considered blood-money, would be used for the workers’ cause. Anna did not discourage her: she did not believe that the national hardship would continue: the economy had improved considerably. When the time came Olivia would do as all girls of her class did. Olivia was a dainty child, with platinum blonde hair, a fair, thin skin, rosy cheeks, a straight neatness and beautiful eyes, with a ring of dark blue outside the iris of china blue; and her manner was charming. Anna looked forward to her adolescence.

Florence spent her money on her parties for the cause, on cheques for charity dinners and in other reputable ways; but occasionally she would go out with Anna on a little shopping spree. Then Anna would buy a handbag, a small jewel, some gloves, persuade Florence that she needed perfume; and they would lunch modestly in some little place Anna and Arthur liked, never in a showy place. On one of these trips, Florence displayed energy. She took her mother in a taxi to a building overlooking the East River and showed her a large ground floor apartment for which she had the keys. Paul could have his studio there: and there was room for Olivia and a nursemaid.

‘I need a child,’ said Florence: ‘it will keep me straight. Paul cannot have children.’

Though Anna listened gracefully, she was discouraging and she went home, herself very discouraged. What of her dream of looking out of the window of her house and seeing her dear family opposite? What about the irritable Howard? She said no more and hoped Paul would object. Olivia was now five: it was 1938.

E
MILY AND STEPHEN HAD
been free-lancing in Hollywood four months when they sold their second script. The morning they heard, on the telephone, from their agent Charlie Goldhammer, that it was sold, they telephoned a house agent to find them a house in a better district of Hollywood. They were then living in a rented house on Rexford Drive, a fairly good address in its upper section, which was about a thousand yards long, but in its lower section an address for newcomers.

The Howards’ rented house was in the lower section. Only a hundred yards from that house the good addresses began. There were the houses of two long-established movie stars, and two other houses rented out by Mollie Pearcorn, private secretary to Ind Pellikan, the ranking director on the MGM lot. His top rating meant that he was the director who then had the conduct of the largest section of allotted expenses, who turned in the largest profit to the company and who knew prudently and as a man of the world how to make suitable losses.

It happened that Ind Pellikan was the director to whom Charlie Goldhammer had sold Emily’s story
Sally In our Alley,
for which she also wrote the script, her first sale when she reached Hollywood. The news that Emily had now sold a second script,
Oh, Sally!
to Ind Pellikan and for $35,000 plus $1,000 weekly for three months was known that same morning throughout Hollywood; that is in well-paid writers’ circles.

When the Howards, after house-hunting, reached home, they fell into raptures. There was a list of telephone calls and invitations from some of the best names of their sort in Hollywood. Emily may have laughed a little, with scorn and contempt, at their sudden rise in the world, ‘accepted at last by the forty-niners’, but she was, with Stephen, touched: for this same society, some of the best names, and people who got the highest prices for their scripts, the most screen credits, had something a little more honourable to recommend it. It was fashionable leftist society, people who without giving up their beliefs had made good in a highly competitive and sometimes hidden game. There were messages too, from the famous Jim Holinshed, elegant radical who had written a novel about the sufferings of some young Nazi soldiers, in a lost company in a citadel which was to fall; and from Godfrey Bowles, a celebrated radical who had written several novels translated east and west. Jim Holinshed for several years had worked with and shared an office and stenographers with Godfrey Bowles. They often wrote scripts together and the names Bowles and Holinshed were treated with respect in the studios; they were considered men of talent, who knew the business.

The Howards spent the next day looking at suitable houses in good districts and arranged to buy a house in Pomegranate Glen. Ranging from the flat seacoast of Santa Monica are a number of sandhills, covered with sparse scrub and the almost pure sand held together otherwise with logs, ivy, desert flora and a few trees. The hollows between the hills are called glens, narrow shallow gullies which decline rapidly towards the place called Beverly Hills.

There were bungalows of all kinds and little houses in all these glens. But the glens varied in social meaning and architecture. Guava Glen was a poor man’s glen, with bungalows and huts built of clapboard and fibrous plaster and other poor materials, and they were sold or let to those who had just arrived in Hollywood and as yet had sold nothing to the studios and had no job. The very next glen, Kumquat Glen, was a little more esteemed and had solider bungalows, newly painted white or yellow and ranged close together on the valuable hillside. Here lived people with regular jobs in Hollywood or Westwood, or writers in the brackets, with long contracts who had jobs, year in, year out. Persimmon Glen, next, was for fastidious writers who had a position in Hollywood society; and here were found also a few agents and architects. Pomegranate Glen was next to it and here were people who were graduating from excitable and unsure radical groups to long-breathed Hollywood society of the stabler sort, people who had had jobs in the studios for many years. Some actors were here, even one director; and here Moffat Byrd, the five-thousand-dollar-a-week man, leader by common consent of Hollywood progressive society, had one of his houses. He was not a foolish spendthrift, no gambler; he invested his money in real estate. He had other houses out in the valley and in Rexford Drive.

The house the Howards saw, in the afternoon, in Pomegranate Glen was exactly what Stephen wanted. He had made up his mind to plunge now, select a house that would suit them, no matter what successes they had.

The Howards gave a house-warming party for the new house, inviting friends in the social stratum they had moved to; they entertained at the new house several times in the week.

The Howards attended the 1945 UNO conference but left before it ended and set out to drive back to Beverly Hills. They had spent all this time and money on the conference to write reports for the New York
Labor Daily
and the Washington
Liberator
, at a time when Emily’s Hollywood agents were waiting for two scripts; and her New York agents for the manuscript of a new book in her moneymaking series,
Mr and Mrs Fairway,
humorous books of family life. The couple quarrelled before starting, about the opinions in Emily’s article for the
Labor Daily;
but she posted it unchanged. As soon as the car started, the tiff began again.

‘This is not for money, Stephen, and I’ll say what I like; it’s the truth.’

‘Oh, damn the truth and damn not for money. You’ll offend the left and you’ve wasted a week rewriting your article when your agents are screaming. But it’s OK, your soul is white and the children won’t eat next week.’

‘Your goddamn article was a palimpsest by the time you’d finished achieving a wise, dry, prescient tone. You had to telephone it to Washington,’ said Emily, but she began to laugh. ‘In Europe contributors to radical sheets go without soles to their shoes and gnaw a dry crust in freezing attic rooms; and we live on the plunder of the land, best hotels, three-room suite, long-distance calls, swell car to run us home to our latest residence; that’s American radicalism I suppose. They can’t pay us so we pay them.’