Some Faces in the Crowd (7 page)

With casual deliberateness (hadn’t Jimmy Starr called him the poor man’s Adolphe Menjou?) André picked out a table one row removed from the dance floor for Mr. Nathan. The waiter, whose ringside table was A. D. Nathan’s “usual,” raised a protest not entirely motivated by sentiment. In Waiter’s Local 67, A. D. Nathan’s fame was based not so much on his pictures as on his tips. “Mr. Nathan will have to be satisfied with this table,” André explained. “All the ringside tables are already reserved.”

André had to smile at his own cleverness. A. D. Nathan did not know it yet, but from the beginning André had had him in mind as the producer of his scenario. A. D. seemed the logical contact because he remembered André as an ordinary waiter in Henry’s back in the days before pictures could talk. But André knew he needed something stronger than nostalgia to bring himself to A.D.’s attention. Every Saturday night Nathan presided at the same table overlooking the floor. Tonight André would make him take a back seat. Nathan would threaten and grumble and André would flash his suave head-waiter smile and be
so sorry M’sieur Nathan, if there were only something I could do …
Then, at the opportune moment, just as the floor show was about to begin, André would discover that something could be done. And when Nathan would try to thank André with a crisp green bill for giving him the table André had been saving for him all evening, Andre’s voice would take on an injured tone.
Merci beaucoup, M’sieur Nathan, thank you just the same, but André is glad to do a favor for an old friend.

André thought of the scene in terms of a scenario. That was the dialogue, just roughed in, of course. Then the business of Nathan insisting on rewarding André for his efforts. And a close-up of André, shyly dropping his eyes as he tells M’sieur Nathan that if he really wants to reward André he could read
Confessions of a Hollywood Waiter
by André de Selco.

So that was André’s dream and he dreamt it all the while he was fussing over last-minute details like a nervous hostess getting ready for a big party.

By the time Nathan’s party arrived, the big room with the cyclamen drapes and pale-green walls of tufted satin was full of laughter, music, shop talk and an inner-circle intimacy that hung over the place like the smoke that rose from lipsticked cigarettes and expensive cigars. Everyone turned to stare at the newcomers, for Hollywood celebrities have a way of gaping at each other with the same wide-eyed curiosity as their supposedly less sophisticated brothers waiting for autographs outside.

Nathan entered with assurance, conscious of the way “There’s A. D.” was breathed through the room. His figure was slight but imposing, for he carried himself with the air of a man who was used to commanding authority. There was something ghostly about him, with his white hair and pale, clean, faintly pink skin, but his eyes were intensely alive, dark eyes that never softened, even when he smiled. As he followed André toward the dance floor, actors, agents, directors and fellow-producers were anxious to catch his eye. It was “Hello, A. D. How are you tonight, A. D.?,” and he would acknowledge them with a word or a nod, knowing how to strike just the right balance between dignity and cordiality.

At his side was his wife, a tall brunette with sculpture-perfect features, hardened by a willful disposition. Some still remembered her as Lita Lawlor, who seemed on the verge of stardom not so many years ago. But she had sacrificed her screen career for love, or so the fan magazines had put it, though gossippers would have you believe that Lita was just swapping one career for another that promised somewhat more permanent security.

Accompanying the Nathans were a plain, middle-aged couple whom no one in Ciro’s could identify, an undiscovered girl of seventeen who was beautiful in an undistinguished way, and Bruce Spencer, a young man whom Nathan was grooming as the next Robert Taylor. And grooming was just the word, for this male ingénue pranced and tossed his curly black mane like a horse on exhibition.

André led the party to the inferior table he had picked out for them.

“Wait a minute. André, this isn’t my table,” Nathan protested.

He frowned at André’s silky explanations. He was in no mood to be crossed this evening. It seemed as if everything was out of sync today. First his three-thousand-dollar-a-week writer had turned in a dime-a-dozen script.

Then he had decided that what he needed was an evening alone with something young and new like this Jenny Robbins, and instead here he was with his wife, that young ham of hers, and those Carterets he’d been ducking for months. And to top everything, there was that business in New York.

Impatiently Nathan beckoned the waiter. “A magnum of Cordon Rouge, 1935.”

1935, Nathan thought. That was the year he almost lost his job. It was a funny thing. All these people hoping to be tossed a bone never thought of A. D. Nathan as a man with a job to hold. But that year, when the panic struck and the banks moved in, he had had to think fast to hold onto that big office and that long title. He wondered what would have become of him if he had lost out. He thought of some of the magic names of the past, like Colonel Selig and J. C. Blackburn, who could walk into Ciro’s now without causing a head to turn. And he thought how frightening it would be to enter Ciro’s without the salaaming reception he always complained about but would have felt lost without.

But he mustn’t worry. His psychiatrist had told him not to worry. He looked across at Jenny with that incredibly young face, so pretty and soft, like a marmalade kitten, he thought. A little wearily, he raised his glass to her. He wondered what she was like, what she was thinking, whether she would. Then he looked at Mimi Carteret. How old she and Lew had become. He could remember when they were the regulars at the Embassy Club and the Coconut Grove. Now their eyes were shining like tourists’ because it had been such a long time since their last evening in Ciro’s.

“Is the wine all right, Lew?” Nathan asked.

Lew Carteret looked up, his face flushed. “All right! I haven’t had wine like this …” He paused to think. “In a long time,” he said.

There was a silence, and Nathan felt embarrassed for him. He was glad when Mimi broke in with the anecdote about the time during Prohibition when they were leaving for Europe with their Western star, Tex Bradley, and Tex insisted on bringing his own Scotch along because he was afraid to trust those foreign bootleggers.

Nathan was only half-listening, though he joined in the laughter. When is Carteret going to put the bite on me for that job he wants?, he was thinking. And what will I have to give the little marmalade kitten? And though he could not divine André’s plans, or guess how he figured in the dreams of the telephone operator who looked like Ava Gardner, he could not help feeling that Ciro’s was a solar system in which he was the sun and around which all these satellites revolved.

“André,” he beckoned, “will you please tell the operator I’m expecting a very important long-distance call?” An empty feeling of excitement rose inside him, but he fought it down. The dancers were swaying to a tango. Nathan saw Spencer and Lita, whirling like professionals, conscious of how well they looked together. He looked at Jenny, and he thought, with a twinge of weariness, of all the Jennys he had looked at this way. “Would you like to dance, my dear?”

He was an old man to Jenny, an old man she hardly knew, and it seemed to her that everybody in the room must be saying, “There goes A. D. with another one.” But she tried to smile, tried to be having a terribly good time, thinking, If I want to be an actress, this is part of the job. And if I can’t look as if I’m getting the thrill of my life out of dancing with this old fossil, what kind of an actress am I anyway?

Nathan could have told her what kind of an actress she was. He had expressed himself rather vividly on that subject after seeing her test that afternoon.

“Robbins stinks,” he had told his assistants as the lights came on in the projection room. “She has a cute figure and a pretty face, but not unusual enough, and her acting is from Hollywood High School.”

That’s what he should have told her. But he needed to be surrounded by Jenny Robbinses. Even though the analyst had told him what that was, he went on tossing them just enough crumbs of encouragement to keep their hopes alive.

“Enjoying yourself, Jenny?” he said as he led her back to the table.

“Oh, I’m having an elegant time, Mr. Nathan,” she said. She tried to say it with personality, her eyes bright and her smile fixed. She felt as if she were back on the set going through the ordeal of making that test again.

“After dancing a tango together, the least we could do is call each other by our first names,” he said.

He tried to remember the first time he had used that line; on Betty Bronson he thought it was. But Jenny laughed as if he had said something terribly witty. She laughed with all her ambition if not with all her heart.

Her heart—or so she thought—had been left behind at 1441 ½ Orange Grove Avenue. That’s where Bill Mason lived. Bill worked as a grip on Nathan’s lot. The grip is the guy who does the dirty work on a movie set. Or, as Bill liked to explain it, “I’m the guy who carries the set on his back. I may not be the power behind the throne but I’m sure the power
under
it.”

Jenny thought of the way she and Bill had planned to spend this evening, down at the Venice Amusement Pier. They usually had a pretty good time down there together Saturday nights. It was their night. Until A. D. Nathan had telephoned, in person.

“Oh, Mr. Nathan, how lovely of you to call! I do have an appointment, but …”

“I wish you could cancel it, dear,” Nathan had said. “There’s … there’s something I’d like to talk to you about. I thought, over a drink at Ciro’s …”

Jenny had never been to Ciro’s, but she could describe every corner of it. It was her idea of what heaven must be like, with producers for gods and agents as their angels.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mac,” Bill had called from the door a little later. “But that Old Bag” (referring to one of the screen’s most glamorous personalities) “blew her lines in the big love scene fifteen straight times. I thought one of the juicers was going to drop a lamp on her.” He looked at Jenny in the sequin dress, the pin-up model. “Hmmm, not bad. But a little fancy for roller-coasting, isn’t it, honey?”

“Bill, I know I’m a monster,” she had said, watching his face carefully, “but I’ve got to see Mr. Nathan tonight. I’d’ve given anything to get out of it, but, well, I don’t want to sound dramatic but … my whole career may depend on it.”

“Listen, Mac,” Bill had said. “You may be kidding yourself, but you can’t kid me. I was on the set when you made that test. If I’m ever going to be your husband I might as well begin right by telling you the truth. You were NG.”

“I suppose you know more about acting than Mr. Nathan,” she said, hating Bill, hating the Venice Pier, hating being nobody. “Mr. Nathan told me himself he wanted to keep my test to look at again.”

“Are you sure it’s the test he wants to keep?” Bill said.

Here in Ciro’s the waiter was filling her glass again, and she was laughing at something funny and off-color that Bruce Spencer had just said. But she couldn’t forget what she had done to Bill, how she had slapped him and handed back the ring, and how, like a scene from a bad B picture, they had parted forever.

For almost fifteen minutes Jenny had cried because Bill was a wonderful fellow and she was going to miss him. And then she had stopped crying and started making up her face for A. D. Nathan because she had read too many movie magazines. This is what makes a great actress, she thought, sorrow and sacrifice of your personal happiness, and she saw herself years later as a great star, running into Bill in Ciro’s after he had become a famous cameraman. “Bill,” she would say, “perhaps it is not too late. Each of us had to follow our own path until they crossed again.”

“Oh, by the way, Lita,” A. D. had told his wife when she came into his dressing room to find out if he had any plans for the evening, “there’s a little actress I’d like to take along to Ciro’s tonight. Trying to build her up. So we’ll need an extra man.”

“We might still be able to get hold of Bruce,” Lita said. “He said something about being free when we left the club this afternoon.”

Nathan knew they could get hold of Bruce. Lita and Bruce were giving the Hollywood wives something to talk about over their canasta these afternoons. Sometimes he dreamt of putting an end to it. But that meant killing two birds with bad publicity. And they were both his birds, his wife and his leading man.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll give Spence a ring. Might not be a bad idea for the Robbins girl to be seen with him.”

Lita pecked him on the cheek. Bruce was dying to get that star-making part in
Wagons Westward.
This might be the evening to talk A. D. into it.

And then, since the four of them might look too obvious, Nathan had wanted an extra couple. He tried several, but it was too late to get anybody in demand, and that’s how, at the last minute, he had happened to think of the Carterets.

When you talked about old-time directors you had to mention Lew Carteret in the same breath with D. W. Griffith and Mickey Neilan. Carteret and Nathan had been a famous combination until sound pictures and the jug had knocked Carteret out of the running. The last job he had had was a quickie Western more than a year ago. And a year in Hollywood is at least a decade anywhere else. A. D. had forgotten all about Carteret until he received a letter from him a few months ago, just a friendly letter, suggesting dinner some evening to cut up touches about old times. But A. D. knew those friendly dinners, knew he owed Carteret a debt he was reluctant to repay, and so, somehow, the letter had gone unanswered. But in spite of himself, his conscience had filed it away for further reference.

“I know who we’ll get. The Lew Carterets. Been meaning to take them to dinner for months.”

“Oh, God,” Lita said, as she drew on a pair of long white gloves that set off her firm tanned arms, “why don’t we get John Bunny and Flora Finch?”