Some Faces in the Crowd (16 page)

From his obscure window, Baxter watched incredulously as the circle of fame spread ever wider around the shadowy figure of his former employee. T. S. Eliot delivered a paper at Harvard on “God and Gods in Sheldon Dicks.” In one feverish fall season there were no fewer than three learned, obscure critiques on Sheldon Dicks
(The Worlds of Sheldon Dicks; Sheldon Dicks: An Exploration of Myth as Metaphor; Underground Stream: Ethos and Decalogue in Sheldon Dicks.)
The
Atlantic Monthly
ran a symposium on Sheldon Dicks and new young poets were accused of trying to write like Sheldon Dicks and Sheldon Dicks’s “symbolistic” view of society became the fashionable one for literary undergraduates. Some young Americans on the Left Bank shaved their beards and cropped their hair in imitation of Sheldon Dicks. There had been nothing like it since the Kafka boom.

Rummaging through his file for some odd pieces of writing that might be fed into the all but dried up stream of his magazine market, Baxter found a few lines scribbled in the margin of an abandoned first chapter of a forgotten novel. “Pl. nt. sug. ch. w’l tp tn S.D.” he read. It brought back to Kenneth Channing Baxter a lost moment from his old world of fame and prosperity when a mousy underling, in line of duty, had scribbled something Baxter would interpret as, “Please note suggested changes. Will type tonight. Sheldon Dicks.”

At a fashionable rare-book store on 57th Street a distinguished-looking relic from the nineteenth century studied through his pince-nez the scribbled notation. Then, deliberately, he compared it with a letter written in the precious hand of Sheldon Dicks. “Yes, yes, this would seem to be quite genuine,” he assured the old man in the worn, expensively cut tweeds. “Signed only with his initials and not with the full name it would be worth” —quickly he consulted an open catalogue—“shall we say, fifty dollars.”

Baxter was glad to get the money. His annuity was small, and he was making out by disposing of odds and ends, first editions, paintings and the like. As he drifted toward the entrance, the title of a book on the first counter caught his eye:
American Writers: 1900-1952.

With the incurable vanity of the once famous he could not resist riffling the index to see if his name was still included.
Ah,
there it was: “Baxter, Kenneth Channing, 67.” As quickly as possible he turned to
his
page and read:

Baxter, Kenneth Channing; popular writer of 20’s and 30’s. Better known as employer of Sheldon Dicks.
See
Sheldon Dicks.

W
HEN I WAS A
little boy, I lived with my parents in what was then a small suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood. My father was general manager in charge of production for Firmament-Famous Artists-Lewin. It was a mouthful, but I used to have to remember the whole thing for the your-father-my-father arguments I was always having with a kid down the block whose old man was only an associate producer at Warner Brothers.

One of the things I remember most about Firmament-Famous Artists-Lewin was the way that studio and Christmas were all mixed up together in my mind. My earliest memory of the Christmas season is associated with a large studio truck, bearing the company’s trademark, that always drove up to the house just before supper on Christmas Eve. I would stand outside the kitchen door with my little sister and watch the driver and his helper carry into our house armload after armload of wonderful red and green packages—all for us. Sometimes the gleaming handlebars of a tricycle or the shiny wheels of a miniature fire engine would break through their bright wrappers, and I’d shout, “I know what that is!” until my mother would lead me away. Santa Claus still had so many houses to visit, she’d say, that I mustn’t get in the way of these two helpers of his. Then I’d go down the street to argue the respective merits of our two studios with the Warner Brothers kid, or pass the time tormenting my little sister, perfectly content in the thought that the Firmament-Famous Artist-Lewin truck was the standard vehicle of transportation for Santa Claus in semitropical climates like Southern California.

On Christmas morning I had the unfortunate habit of rising at five o’clock, rushing across the hallway to my sister’s room in annual disobedience of my mother’s request to rise quietly, and shouting, “Merry Christmas, Sandra! Let’s wake Mommy and Daddy and open our presents.”

We ran down the hall into the master bedroom with its canopied twin beds. “Merry Christmas!” we shouted together. My father groaned, rolled over and pulled the covers further up over his head. He was suffering the aftereffects of the studio’s annual all-day Christmas party from which he hadn’t returned until after we had gone to sleep. I climbed up on the bed, crawling over him, and bounced up and down, chanting, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. …”

“Oh-h-h …” Father said, and flipped over on his belly. Mother shook his shoulder gently. “Sol, I hate to wake you, but the children won’t go down without you.”

Father sat up slowly, muttering something about its being still dark outside and demanding to know who had taken his bathrobe. Mother picked it up where he had dropped it and brought it to him. It was black and white silk with an elegant embroidered monogram.

“The kids’ll be opening presents for the next twelve hours,” my father said. “It seems God-damn silly to start opening them at five o’clock in the morning.”

Downstairs there were enough toys, it seemed, to fill all the windows of a department store. The red car was a perfect model of a Pierce-Arrow, and probably only slightly less expensive, with a green leather seat wide enough for Sandra to sit beside me, and real headlights that turned on and off. There was a German electric train that passed through an elaborate Bavarian village in miniature. And a big scooter with rubber wheels and a gear shift just like our Cadillac’s. And dozens more that I’ve forgotten. Sandra had a doll that was a life-size replica of Baby Peggy, which was Early Twenties for Margaret O’Brien, an imported silk Hungarian peasant costume from Lord & Taylor, a six-ounce bottle of French toilet water, and so many other things that we all had to help her unwrap them.

Just when we were reaching the end of this supply, people started arriving with more presents. That’s the way it had been every Christmas since I could remember, men and women all dressed up dropping in all day long with packages containing wonderful things that they’d wait for us to unwrap. They’d sit around a while, laughing with my mother and father and lifting from James the butler’s tray a cold yellow drink that I wasn’t allowed to have, and then they’d pick us up and kiss us and tell us we were as pretty as my mother or as intelligent as my father and then there would be more laughing and hugging and hand-shaking and God bless you and then they’d be gone, and others would arrive to take their place. Sometimes there must have been ten or twenty all there at once and Sandra and I would be sort of sorry in a way because Mother and Father would be too busy with their guests to play with us. But it was nice to get all those presents.

I remember one tall dark man with a little pointed mustache who kissed Mother’s hand when he came in. His present was wrapped in beautiful silvery paper and the blue ribbon around it felt thick and soft like one of Mother’s evening dresses. Inside was a second layer of thin white tissue paper and inside of that was a handsome silver comb-and-brush set, just like my father’s. Tied to it was a little card that I could read because it was printed and I could read almost anything then as long as it wasn’t handwriting: “Merry Christmas to my future boss from Uncle Norman.”

“Mommy,” I said, “is Uncle Norman my uncle? You never told me I had an Uncle Norman. I have an Uncle Dave and an Uncle Joe and an Uncle Sam, but I never knew I had an Uncle Norman.”

I can still remember how white and even Norman’s teeth looked when he smiled at me. “I’m a new uncle,” he said. “Don’t you remember the day your daddy brought you on my set and I signed your autograph book and I told you to call me Uncle Norman?”

I combed my hair with his silver comb suspiciously. “Did you give me this comb and brush … Uncle Norman?”

Norman drank down the last of the foamy yellow stuff and carefully wiped off his mustaches with his pale-blue breast-pocket handkerchief. “Yes, I did, sonny,” he said.

I turned on my mother accusingly. “But you said Santa Claus gives us all these presents.”

This all took place, as I found out later, at a crucial moment in my relationship with S. Claus, when a child’s faith was beginning to crumble under the pressure of suspicions. Mother was trying to keep Santa Claus alive for us as long as possible, I learned subsequently, so that Christmas would mean something more to us than a display of sycophancy on the part of Father’s stars, directors, writers and job-seekers.

“Norman signed his name to your comb and brush because he is one of Santa Claus’s helpers,” Mother said. “Santa has so much work to do taking care of all the good little children in the world that he needs lots and lots of helpers.”

My father offered one of his long, fat cigars to “Uncle” Norman and bit off the end of another one for himself.

“Daddy, is that true, what Mommy says?” I asked.

“You must always believe your mother, boy,” my father said.

“I’ve got twenty-eleven presents already,” Sandra said.

“You mean thirty-one,” I said. “I’ve got thirty-two.”

Sandra tore open a box that held an exquisite little gold ring, inlaid with amethyst, her birthstone.

“Let me read the card,” I said. “‘Merry Christmas, Sandra darling, from your biggest fan, Aunt Ruth.’”

Ruth was the pretty lady who played opposite Uncle Norman in one of my father’s recent pictures. I hadn’t been allowed to see it, but I used to boast to that Warner Brothers kid about how much better it was than anything Warners’ could make.

Sandra, being very young, tossed Aunt Ruth’s gold ring away and turned slowly in her hand the little box it had come in. “Look, it says numbers on it,” she said. “Why are the numbers, Chris?”

I studied it carefully. “Ninety-five. That looks like dollars,” I said. “Ninety-five dollars. Where does Santa Claus get all his money, Daddy?”

My father gave my mother a questioning look. “Er … what’s that, son?” I had to repeat the question. “Oh … those aren’t dollars, no … That’s just the number Santa puts on his toys to keep them from getting all mixed up before he sends them down from the North Pole,” my father said, and then he took a deep breath and another gulp of that yellow drink.

More people kept coming in all afternoon. More presents. More uncles and aunts. More Santa Claus’s helpers. I never realized he had so many helpers. All afternoon the phone kept ringing, too. “Sol, you might as well answer it, it must be for you,” my mother would say, and then I could hear my father laughing on the phone: “Thanks, L.B., and a merry Christmas to you … Thanks, Joe … Thanks, Mary … Thanks, Doug … Merry Christmas, Pola …” Gifts kept arriving late into the day, sometimes in big limousines and town cars, carried in by chauffeurs in snappy uniforms. No matter how my father explained it, it seemed to me that Santa must be as rich as Mr. Zukor.

Just before supper, one of the biggest stars in Father’s pictures drove up in a Rolls Royce roadster, the first one I had ever seen. She came in with a tall, broad-shouldered, sunburned man who laughed at anything anybody said. She was a very small lady and she wore her hair tight around her head like a boy’s. She had on a tight yellow dress that only came down to the top of her knees. She and the man she was with had three presents for me and four for Sandra. She looked down at me and said, “Merry Christmas, you little darling,” and before I could get away, she had picked me up and was kissing me. She smelled all funny, with perfumy sweetness mixed up with the way Father smelled when he came home from that Christmas party at the studio and leaned over my bed to kiss me when I was half asleep.

I didn’t like people to kiss me, especially strangers. “Lemme go,” I said.

“That’s no way to act, Sonny,” the strange man said.

“Why, right this minute every man in America would like to be in your shoes.”

All the grownups laughed, but I kept squirming, trying to get away. “Aw, don’t be that way, honey,” the movie star said. “Why, I love men!”

They all laughed again. I didn’t understand it so I started to cry. Then she put me down. “All right for you,” she said, “if you don’t want to be my boy friend.”

After she left, when I was unwrapping her presents, I asked my father, “Who is she? Is she one of Santa Claus’s helpers, too?” Father winked at Mother, turned his head away, put his hand to his mouth and laughed into it, but I saw him. Mother looked at him the way she did when she caught me taking a piece of candy just before supper. “Her name is Clara, dear,” she said. “She’s one of Santa Claus’s helpers, too.”

And that’s the way Christmas was, until one Christmas when a funny thing happened. The big Firmament-Famous Artists-Lewin truck never showed up. I kept looking for it all afternoon, but it never came. When it got dark and it was time for me to have my supper and go to bed and still no truck, I got pretty worried. My mind ran back through the year trying to remember some bad thing I might have done that Santa was going to punish me for. I had done lots of bad things, like slapping my sister and breaking my father’s fountain pen, but they were no worse than the stuff I had pulled the year before. Yet what other reason could there possibly be for that truck not showing up?

Another thing that seemed funny about that Christmas Eve was that my father didn’t bother to go to his studio Christmas party. He stayed home all morning and read aloud to me from a Christmas present he let me open a day early, a big blue book called
Typee.
And late that night when I tiptoed halfway down the stairs to watch my mother trim the tree that Santa was supposed to decorate, my father was helping her string the colored lights. Another thing different about that Christmas was that when Sandra and I ran in shouting and laughing at five, as we always did, my father got up just as soon as my mother.