Super (2 page)

Ralph had been shuttling back and forth among the compartments of Gable, Wheeler and the other passengers for whom he had the responsibility.

“Thank you,” said Gable, after taking a short draw on the Kent he was smoking. He smiled but it was a nervous smile, something Ralph saw as unusual. The King was normally so at ease with him and most everyone else.

Ralph, still smiling as he moved toward the door, asked, “You’ll be wanting dinner here in the compartment as always?”

Gable nodded. “As always, right.”

“The usual, sir?”

“Yes … of course. The usual.”

Ralph, keeping his real reactions to himself, said, “Good, good. That’s good. The shrimp is particularly fresh and whopping for the cocktail, the double sirloin is red as ever for you to have it rare, the corn chowder is as good as ever …”

Ralph waited a beat for a response that didn’t come. Then he said, “Red wine, of course. There’s a fine new one from Bordeaux, I understand.”

“Of course.”

“Yes, sir. What time are you wanting to be served, Mr. Gable?”

When Gable didn’t answer immediately, Ralph added, “Your usual time? Around nine?”

“Yes … of course,” Gable said.

“Yes, sir. What about any beautiful Strays who may want to pay their respects on this trip?” Ralph asked matter-of-factly, same as with the food and drink, as if it was part of the routine—the ritual. A Stray was the term for any paying passenger who was not recognized by any crew member as a Star or a Regular.

“Maybe … Yes. Why not? Although, it’s possible nobody’ll even know I’m on the train.”

Ralph chuckled. “Now, Mr. Gable, you know better than that. There’s no way to keep The King a secret. It’s almost like the word spreads from one end of the train to the other with the clicking of the wheels on the track. Clark Gable’s on board,
Clark Gable’s on board. The King is here, The King is here. Clickety-click, clickety-click, clickety-click, click, click.”

Gone with the Wind
and Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash had dramatically intensified the attention—and the opportunities. It went with being The King.

“I take it you want to wait awhile for me to make up the bed, sir, as usual?” said Ralph. It was his last question.

“That’s right, as usual—everything the way you always do it,” said Gable. “I’m just going to sit here for a while.”

He reached down to a small leather briefcase and unbuckled it. He pulled out an opened carton of Kent cigarettes and then, one at a time, four bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch.

Ralph recognized them as being among Clark Gable’s usual companions.

“This train, this lovely Super Chief, is the only place I feel safe anymore, Gene,” said Darwin Rinehart. “How sick is that for a man my age?”

“Dead sick,” replied Gene Mathews.

“This could be my last trip on the Super,” Rinehart said. “How sad is that to think about for a man my age?”

“Stupid sad,” said Mathews.

He and Rinehart were sitting in the side-by-side lounge chairs in their drawing room. Rinehart told Mathews what had just happened with Clark Gable.

“It’s not personal with Gable or anybody else out there. It’s business. You know that,” Mathews said. “They’re afraid if they pay attention to somebody who’s down they’ll get sick with down, too. Down by association.”

Down by reputation, too. And by failure. And now by humiliation, with everyone in Hollywood from Gable and the stars on to stagehands. Darwin Rinehart’s biggest movie,
Dark Days
, had flopped so spectacularly that everything he had went down with it.

Now Rinehart didn’t wait for Ralph to come back with the Beefeater martini—straight up with three tiny olives—that was his automatic onboard drink. Instead, he took a sip out of the thin silver flask of gin that he had stuck into his suitcase. The cast of
The Tie That Binds
had given it to him when the picture was nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. Their names were engraved on one side along with his.

Mathews said, “We’ve talked and talked about this. I’m sick of talking about this. It’s only over for you in your head—not in real life.”

Darwin Rinehart, still barely forty years old, had done well as a producer when he was young, run a successful studio and made several pictures that won great reviews and honors. He had escaped the Hollywood blacklist and Red Scare problems of the last few years because he was mostly a nonpolitical Republican who didn’t know any Communists. But even so, he hit a string of bad luck on his movies, and nothing much good of
any kind had happened to him lately even before the gigantic failure of
Dark Days
.

“I can’t make a picture because everybody knows I’m a loser, I’m broke, that’s the problem,” Rinehart said to Mathews.

“Broke you are. Loser you are not. We could have flown back and forth to LA five times for what it’s costing for this train setup. Going to New York to see plays you really couldn’t even afford to see much less buy their movie rights was nuts.”

“I always go to New York to see plays whether I use them or not and I will always go on the train—on the Super Chief—whether I can afford it or not. The Super is where I belong to the end.”

“You’re nowhere near the end, except in your bad dreams,” Mathews said, turning his attention back to his book,
Elmer Gantry
, by Sinclair Lewis.

As much to the compartment walls and windows as to Mathews, Rinehart said, “They’re going to take everything I have left. They’ve already got liens on everything at the studio—including my Brancusi. You know that.”

Darwin Rinehart rubbed his right hand over his hairless head, made so by his twice-daily shaving. It was something he began five years ago after his premature baldness had removed most every other small sign of his graying dark brown hair anyhow. The story, often told with Rinehart’s encouragement in movie magazines and elsewhere, was that the inspiration for
the shaved head was the white marble egg-shaped sculpture by Constantin Brancusi that had become Rinehart’s most treasured possession.

Mathews, whose head was covered in thick black hair combed straight back with the help of much Vitalis hair tonic, didn’t even look up from his book. He said, “Television. How many times do I have to say this? Make a deal with one of the television networks, take the deal to the bank for some financing. That’s what Loretta Young did and look at her. She’s winning Emmys and making bundles of money.”

“Traitor! She’s a traitor to pictures!”

Ralph arrived with Rinehart’s martini. Mathews, a recovering alcoholic, had a Coca-Cola. They asked Ralph to make a reservation for dinner in the dining car for eight … eight thirty, whatever worked.

“We’ll wait for a table for two—by ourselves,” Rinehart said to Ralph. “No shared table—always. Got it?”

“Got it always, Mr. Rinehart, yes, sir—always,” said Ralph.

After Ralph left, neither said anything for a good four or five minutes. Mathews returned to Sinclair Lewis; Rinehart looked out the drawing room window at the Texas Chief, preparing to leave from the next track.

“Dark Days
was not my fault,” Rinehart said finally. “The script was a mess by the time we started shooting, Sol turned out to be a directing nightmare, the actors were mostly on dope, that dust storm blew up from Nevada to Utah on us at the worst possible time.”

“I know, I know—I was there, too, remember.”

“Same kind of problem for that awful John Wayne flop …”

“John Wayne as Genghis Khan, how could it have been anything but a flop,” Mathews said.

“I meant the Utah dust.”

Mathews nodded knowingly. Part of Wayne’s awful movie had been shot in the same desert location just before Rinehart’s.

“The Conquerer
was his picture, his bomb,” Mathews said. “
Dark Days
was your picture, your bomb. Just like the last three before. That makes four bombs in a row, which adds up to where you are. I’m sick of talking about this.”

“Duke Wayne will survive
The Conqueror
, but Gable’s as through as I am. When I saw him just now it looked like even his big ears were smaller. Hands, too. Everything about him is shrinking.”

“Except his bank account,” said Mathews.

“Money’s only his third love behind booze and broads. He lives to drink and screw and if it hadn’t been for
Gone with the Wind
he wouldn’t be able to do either on this train or anywhere else. I hear Warner Brothers is after him to make a Civil War picture with Yvonne De Carlo playing a mulatto slave. It’s a
Gone with the Wind
takeoff. Without
Gone with the Wind
, Gable would be nothing.”

“That’s like saying the Yankees would be nothing without DiMaggio. The Yankees
have
DiMaggio, Gable’s
got
his
Gone with the Wind
. Do television.”

“Never!”

Both became silent again until Rinehart, almost in a whisper, said, “Don’t ever leave me, Gene.”

“I won’t, Dar,” said Mathews. He spoke in his normal voice. “I’ve said it to you a million times. I’m tired of saying it.”

“When you leave me, that’s when I’ll know it’s really over.”

“For the last time—I won’t, Dar,” Mathews said.

“Everything’s for the last time,” Rinehart mumbled out toward Track 8, where the Texas Chief was also preparing for departure.

Ralph returned to Otto Wheeler’s drawing room. Charlie Sanders was still there.

“I see you’re traveling alone, is that right, Mr. Wheeler?” asked Ralph, as he and Sanders helped Wheeler from the wheelchair into the dark green parlor chair that faced the room’s large outside window.

Otto Wheeler nodded.

“What’s your Mr. Pollack up to?” asked Ralph, referring to the assistant who often traveled with Wheeler in the next compartment.

“He went ahead yesterday to take care of some business for me,” Wheeler said. “He’s going to meet me at the station in Bethel.”

Wheeler turned to stare out the window even though there
was not much to see except the Texas Chief and railroad employees passing by on missions involving one of the two trains. The Texas Chief, also a streamliner of gleaming corrugated lightweight steel, had been scheduled to leave an hour before the Super, at 6:00 p.m., for Fort Worth, Houston, Galveston and other points south. But it was already almost 6:20.

“They better get a move on over there or it’ll slow us down—make us late even,” said Ralph to Sanders before Wheeler had a chance to raise the point. “The Texas Chief goes right along an hour ahead of us on the same track past Kansas City into Kansas.”

I know that!
Sanders wanted to bark. But he remained silent. It seemed to Sanders that some porters, conductors and the other men who actually worked on the trains couldn’t resist trying to show up those they called Office People, who were not real railroaders. Ralph probably saw him in particular as not just Office People but a person of no age, no experience—a child who had no business holding down a position of any authority at the Santa Fe railroad. After beginning as a clerk in the passenger traffic office, he was actually thirty-two years old and had been with the railroad for ten years. His crew-cut blond hair and baby freckled face made him seem much younger.

“I guess you’ll be wanting dinner served here in the drawing room, is that right, Mr. Wheeler?” asked Ralph, as Sanders stepped back toward the door.

“That’s right, Ralph. Thank you. I’ll have the whitefish—grilled—and
the jellied consommé. Cold, please. That ought to do it.”

“No blueberry pie tonight, sir?”

“No, no.”

“Wine, sir? We’re carrying a special red from France and two whites, one from—”

Wheeler’s wave stopped Ralph from finishing the sentence. “Iced tea, then?”

“Just a cup of Sanka coffee, thank you.”

Suddenly the Texas Chief began to move, finally showing the lighted blue circle drumhead at the rear of its observation car that had Texas Chief emblazoned on it along with an Indian chief wearing a headdress. The sign on the end of the Super Chief’s observation car was similar except that its basic color was yellow.