Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) (6 page)

“—this has as much passion as that Oscar on my desk.”

“What the hell!” said Wylie. “She’s full of it. Why she goes to—–”

“She’s loose enough,” said Stahr, “—but that’s all. There’s one scene in the play better than all this you cooked up, and you’ve left it out. When she’s trying to make the time pass by changing her watch.”

“It didn’t seem to fit,” Wylie apologized.

“Now,” said Stahr, “I’ve got about fifty ideas. I’m going to call Miss Doolan.” He pressed a button. “—And if there’s anything you don’t understand, speak up—–”

Miss Doolan slid in almost imperceptibly. Pacing the floor swiftly, Stahr began. In the first place he wanted to tell them what kind of a girl she was—what kind of a girl he approved of here. She was a perfect girl with a few small faults as in the play, but a perfect girl not because the public wanted her that way but because it was the kind of girl that he, Stahr, liked to see in this sort of picture. Was that clear? It was no character role. She stood for health, vitality, ambition and love. What gave the play its importance was entirely a situation in which she found herself. She became possessed of a secret that affected a great many lives. There was a right thing and a wrong thing to do—at first it was not plain which was which, but when it was, she went right away and did it. That was the kind of story this was—thin, clean and shining. No doubts.

“She has never heard the word labor troubles,” he said with a sigh. “She might be living in 1929. Is it plain what kind of girl I want?”

“It’s very plain, Monroe.”

“Now about the things she does,” said Stahr. “At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard. Is that plain, Wylie?”

“Passionately plain.”

“Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her strength to sleep with Ken Willard.
But
at no time do you give the impression that she would ever consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. I’m ashamed of having to tell you these kindergarten facts, but they have somehow leaked out of the story.”

He opened the script and began to go through it page by page. Miss Doolan’s notes would be typed in quintuplicate and given to them, but Jane Meloney made notes of her own. Broaca put his hand up to his half-closed eyes—he could remember “when a director was something out here,” when writers were gag-men or eager and ashamed young reporters full of whiskey—a director was all there was then. No supervisor—no Stahr.

He started wide-awake as he heard his name.

“It would be nice, John, if you could put the boy on a pointed roof and let him walk around and keep the camera on him. You might get a nice feeling—not danger, not suspense, not pointing for anything—a kid on the roof in the morning.”

Broaca brought himself back in the room.

“All right,” he said, “—just an element of danger.”

“Not exactly,” said Stahr. “He doesn’t start to fall off the roof. Break into the next scene with it.”

“Through the window,” suggested Jane Meloney. “He could climb in his sister’s window.”

“That’s a good transition,” said Stahr. “Right into the diary scene.”

Broaca was wide-awake now.

“I’ll shoot up at him,” he said. “Let him go away from the camera. Just a fixed shot from quite a distance—let him go away from the camera. Don’t follow him. Pick him up in a close shot and let him go away again. No attention on him except against the whole roof and the sky.” He liked the shot—it was a director’s shot that didn’t come up on every page any more. He might use a crane—it would be cheaper in the end than building the roof on the ground with a process sky. That was one thing about Stahr—the literal sky was the limit. He had worked with Jews too long to believe legends that they were small with money.

“In the third sequence have him hit the priest,” Stahr said.

“What!” Wylie cried, “—and have the Catholics on our neck.”

“I’ve talked to Joe Breen. Priests have been hit. It doesn’t reflect on them.”

His quiet voice ran on—stopped abruptly as Miss Doolan glanced at the clock.

“Is that too much to do before Monday?” he asked Wylie.

Wylie looked at Jane and she looked back, not even bothering to nod. He saw their week-end melting away, but he was a different man from when he entered the room. When you were paid fifteen hundred a week, emergency work was one thing you did not skimp, nor when your picture was threatened. As a “free lance” writer Wylie had failed from lack of caring, but here was Stahr to care, for all of them. The effect would not wear off when he left the office—not anywhere within the walls of the lot. He felt a great purposefulness. The mixture of common sense, wise sensibility, theatrical ingenuity, and a certain half-naïve conception of the common weal which Stahr had just stated aloud, inspired him to do his part, to get his block of stone in place, even if the effort were foredoomed, the result as dull as a pyramid.

Out of the window Jane Meloney watched the trickle streaming toward the commissary. She would have her lunch in her office and knit a few rows while it came. The man was coming at one-fifteen with the French perfume smuggled over the Mexican border. That was no sin—it was like prohibition.

Broaca watched as Reinmund fawned upon Stahr. He sensed that Reinmund was on his way up. He received seven hundred and fifty a week for his partial authority over directors, writers and stars who got much more. He wore a pair of cheap English shoes he had bought near the Beverly Wilshire, and Broaca hoped they hurt his feet, but soon now he would order his shoes from Peel’s and put away his little green Alpine hat with a feather. Broaca was years ahead of him. He had a fine record in the war, but he had never felt quite the same with himself since he had let Ike Franklin strike him in the face with his open hand.

There was smoke in the room, and behind it, behind his great desk, Stahr was withdrawing further and further, in all courtesy, still giving Reinmund an ear and Miss Doolan an ear. The conference was over.

[
Stahr was to have received the Danish Prince Agge, who “wanted to learn about pictures from the beginning” and who in the author’s cast of characters is described as an “early Fascist.”
]

“Mr. Marcus calling from New York,” said Miss Doolan.

“What do you mean?” demanded Stahr. “Why, I saw him here last night.”

“Well, he’s on the phone—it’s a New York call and Miss Jacobs’ voice. It’s his office.”

Stahr laughed.

“I’m seeing him at lunch,” he said. “There’s no aeroplane fast enough to take him there.”

Miss Doolan returned to the phone. Stahr lingered to hear the outcome.

“It’s all right,” said Miss Doolan presently. “It was a mistake. Mr. Marcus called East this morning to tell them about the quake and the flood on the back lot, and it seems he asked them to ask you about it. It was a new secretary who didn’t understand Mr. Marcus. I think she got mixed up.”

“I think she did,” said Stahr grimly.

Prince Agge did not understand either of them, but, looking for the fabulous, he felt it was something triumphantly American. Mr. Marcus, whose quarters could be seen across the way, had called his New York office to ask Stahr about the flood. The Prince imagined some intricate relationship without realizing that the transaction had taken place entirely within the once brilliant steel-trap mind of Mr. Marcus, which was intermittently slipping.

“I think she was a very new secretary,” repeated Stahr. “Any other messages?”

“Mr. Robinson called in,” Miss Doolan said, as he started for the commissary. “One of the women told him her name, but he’s forgotten it—he thinks it was Smith or Brown or Jones.”

“That’s a great help.”

“And he remembers she says she just moved to Los Angeles.”

“I remember she had a silver belt,” Stahr said, “with stars cut out of it.”

“I’m still trying to find out more about Pete Zavras. I talked to his wife.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, they’ve had an awful time—given up their house—she’s been sick—–”

“Is the eye-trouble hopeless?”

“She didn’t seem to know anything about the state of his eyes. She didn’t even know he was going blind.”

“That’s funny.”

He thought about it on the way to luncheon, but it was as confusing as the actor’s trouble this morning. Troubles about people’s health didn’t seem within his range—he gave no thought to his own. In the lane beside the commissary he stepped back as an open electric truck crammed with girls in the bright costumes of the Regency came rolling in from the back lot. The dresses were fluttering in the wind, the young painted faces looked at him curiously, and he smiled as it went by.

Eleven men and their guest, Prince Agge, sat at lunch in the private dining room of the studio commissary. They were the money men—they were the rulers; and unless there was a guest, they ate in broken silence, sometimes asking questions about each other’s wives and children, sometimes discharging a single absorption from the forefront of their consciousness. Eight out of the ten were Jews—five of the ten were foreign-born, including a Greek and an Englishman; and they had all known each other for a long time: there was a rating in the group, from old Marcus down to old Leanbaum, who had bought the most fortunate block of stock in the business and never was allowed to spend over a million a year producing.

Old Marcus still managed to function with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned him of danger, of gangings up against him—he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.

As he was the oldest, Stahr was the youngest of the group—not by many years at this date, though he had first sat with most of these men when he was a boy wonder of twenty-two. Then, more than now, he had been a money man among money men. Then he had been able to figure costs in his head with a speed and accuracy that dazzled them—for they were not wizards or even experts in that regard, despite the popular conception of Jews in finance. Most of them owed their success to different and incompatible qualities. But in a group a tradition carries along the less adept, and they were content to look at Stahr for the sublimated auditing, and experience a sort of glow as if they had done it themselves, like rooters at a football game.

Stahr, as will presently be seen, had grown away from that particular gift, though it was always there.

Prince Agge sat between Stahr and Mort Fleishacker, the company lawyer, and across from Joe Popolos the theatre owner. He was hostile to Jews in a vague general way that he tried to cure himself of. As a turbulent man, serving his time in the Foreign Legion, he thought that Jews were too fond of their own skins. But he was willing to concede that they might be different in America under different circumstances, and certainly he found Stahr was much of a man in every way. For the rest—he thought most business men were dull dogs—for final reference he reverted always to the blood of Bernadotte in his veins.

My father—I will call him Mr. Brady, as Prince Agge did when he told me of this luncheon—was worried about a picture, and when Leanbaum went out early, he came up and took his chair opposite.

“How about the South America picture idea, Monroe?” he asked.

Prince Agge noticed a blink of attention toward them as distinct as if a dozen pairs of eyelashes had made the sound of batting wings. Then silence again.

“We’re going ahead with it,” said Stahr.

“With that same budget?” Brady asked.

Stahr nodded.

“It’s out of proportion,” said Brady. “There won’t be any miracle in these bad times—no
Hell’s Angels
or
Ben Hur,
when you throw it away and get it back.”

Probably the attack was planned, for Popolos, the Greek, took up the matter in a sort of double talk.

“It’s not adoptable, Monroe, in as we wish adopt to this times in as it changes. It what could be done as we run the gamut of prosperity is scarcely conceptuable now.”

“What do you think, Mr. Marcus?” asked Stahr.

All eyes followed his down the table, but, as if forewarned, Mr. Marcus had already signalled his private waiter behind him that he wished to rise, and was even now in a basket-like position in the waiter’s arms. He looked at them with such helplessness that it was hard to realize that in the evenings he sometimes went dancing with his young Canadian girl.

“Monroe is our production genuis,” he said. “I count upon Monroe and lean heavily upon him. I have not seen the flood myself.”

There was a moment of silence as he moved from the room.

“There’s not a two million dollar gross in the country now,” said Brady.

“Is not,” agreed Popolos. “Even as if so you could grab them by the head and push them by and in, is not.”