West of Sunset (3 page)

“Eddie says you were here at eight,” Dottie said. “You know you can't do that.”

“You'll make the rest of us look positively slothful,” Alan finished.

“And you're not.”

“Only milkmen do their best work before ten.”

“He speaks from experience,” Dottie said. “Where do they have you staying?”

“The Miramar.”

“No,” Alan said, scandalized.

“Yes.”

“You don't want to be there,” Dottie said. “It's not near anything.”

“It's near the beach.”

“The beach is for people who can't read,” Alan said.

“The beach is for people who can't afford a pool,” Dottie said. “We have a pool where we are, and it's cheaper than the Miramar.”

“I like that.”

“Who comes all the way to Hollywood to live in Santa Monica? You really shouldn't be out there by yourself. We'll talk at lunch. We just wanted to say hi. You know Ernest's going to be in town tomorrow.”

God, no. “I didn't.”

“We're having a little fund-raiser for Spain at Freddie March's. Ernest's going to show his film, but that's no reason not to come.”

“‘To grow the harvest,'” Alan intoned gravely, “‘the farmers of the village need rain.'”

“It's ghastly, but it gets the big fish to write big checks.”

“It sounds like they need more than checks over there.”

“I wish Hollywood made airplanes,” Dottie said. “They barely make movies, which is what we have to go do.”

“Back to the salt mines.” Alan waved playfully. “Glad you're back.”

Scott resumed his vigil at the window. The cat was gone. A Cord roadster with a bottle blonde in the passenger seat idled outside the drugstore. The paradise of Edendale beckoned. The vent soughed.

It was like Dottie to adopt him, but why of all people did it have to be Ernest visiting, and why had his initial reaction been alarm? He was the one who should be angry, after that crack about him and the rich in Ernest's story—a shrill, predictable story at that. They all were now. The precise quietude that excited Scott in his early work had given way to broader, more blatant gestures. His last novel might have been written by Steinbeck or any of those New Masses copycats, and yet, because it outsold
Tender Is the Night
, he was the one who told Max that Scott had betrayed his gift. It was this judgment, partly true yet wholly unfair, coming from Ernest, which kept Scott from wanting to see him.

He was reading
Nostromo
when the noon siren blew, summoning the lot to lunch. Doors opened and the hall filled with voices as if class had let out. After the quiet, the noise was intimidating. He waited for Eddie to come get him, thinking he'd been too much by himself lately.

Eddie had with him a squat, balding man in a pumpkin-colored muumuu of a sport shirt—Oppy: George Oppenheimer. He was an old pro, Eddie said. Been around since before
Ben-Hur
. Scott didn't remember him.

“Welcome aboard, pal.” Oppenheimer wore a ruby pinkie ring like a Brooklyn bookie. His grip was soft and moist, and as they walked the half-block to the commissary he dabbed at his forehead with a rumpled handkerchief. While Scott was tempted to ask what project had him bashing away at his machine at eight in the morning, he obeyed the professional courtesy of letting the writer volunteer that information. As he'd hoped, Oppenheimer didn't make him confess he'd left a sick wife and budding daughter to doctor
A Yank at Oxford
.

The commissary wasn't new, the exterior had just been remodeled. Unlike the rest of the world, Metro had done well this last decade, and, like any triumphant regime, hadn't been able to resist the temptation to decorate itself. So many buildings had been redone in sleek Streamline Moderne, the lot looked like a harbor full of ships at anchor.

The first familiar face he saw in the Lion's Den was Joan Crawford's, on her way out with a box lunch. From habit he played the doorman for her, earning a smile and a nod. Once she would have known his as well, but that had been fifteen years ago, in the silent era, and she passed without a word.

While the interior of the commissary had changed to a deco chrome-and-pale-green-Formica scheme, the layout was the same, and the smell—the salty steam of chicken broth and dishwater. Dottie and Alan had saved them space at the writers' table, against the far wall, a perfect spot to watch the producers at the main table in the center of the room. Sleeves rolled to his elbows, the molelike L.B. Mayer was holding forth on some matter of import to a group that included George Cukor, but Scott was more interested in gimlet-eyed Myrna Loy, in the powdered wig and heavy pancake makeup of a courtesan, picking the hard-boiled egg out of her chopped salad.

“How's Louie Pasteur treating you, Oppy?” Dottie asked.

“The guy's a pain in the keister. Go ahead, laugh, it'll be your turn next. You try and sell an old French fart as your lead.”

“Oppy's our resident romantic,” Alan said. “When your producer asks, ‘Where's the love interest?' Here he is.”

“Boy meets germ, boy loses germ,” Dottie said.

Dottie and Alan were working on
Sweethearts
for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, cast as a beloved song-and-dance team who hate each other offstage.

“How's it coming?” Eddie asked.

“Very well, thanks,” Alan said.

“It's absolute shit,” Dottie said. “You'll love it.”

Having nothing to add, with a view of the whole room, Scott lost himself in stargazing. Right beside Ronald Colman, Spencer Tracy was tucking into a triple-decker club; next to him, her famous lips pursed, Katharine Hepburn blew on a spoonful of tomato soup. Mayer and Cukor were showily spinning an hourglass-shaped cage of dice to see who'd pay. It was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. The rest of them were extras.

Since he'd been on the wagon he relied on sweets to give him a midday boost. He decided on the ham salad sandwich and was mulling ordering the tapioca when a portly Fu Manchu in a red silk cape and kimono, long black braids and stiff lacquered mustache pulled out the chair opposite him.

“Would you look what the Depression dragged in,” Fu Manchu said, extending a hand.

Scott gathered his napkin and stood, then realized with dismay that it wasn't an actor under that getup but Dottie's old Algonquin partner Bob Benchley. Years back, Scott had taken him and all the Round Table to task in the
New York World
for not producing anything serious. Now he'd become a kind of minor celebrity, starring in his own zany short subjects.

“How's business?” Scott asked.

“Grand, just grand. Actually, Hem and I are having lunch tomorrow. He wanted me to see if you'd like to come along.”

“I don't know that I can get away.” He looked to Eddie.

“It's fine. We won't have pages for you till Monday anyway.”

“Perfect,” Benchley said. “Come by my place around noon.”

They were all staying at The Garden of Allah in Hollywood, right on Sunset. Everyone was there—Sid Perelman and Don Stewart and Ogden Nash. Dottie knew of at least two villas that were open.

“She gets a finder's fee,” Alan said, so deadpan that Scott wasn't sure it was a joke.

When the waitress came to Benchley, without consulting a menu he ordered the sea bass meunière with mashed potatoes and corn, and the tapioca. Scott had just the sandwich, which was dry, and watched as Fu Manchu gobbled everything down.

“I wish I could stay,” Benchley announced, dabbing at his mustache and pushing back his chair, “but I have a dynasty to maintain.”

“The Dong Dynasty,” Alan said, because it was rumored to be prodigious.

“That rises and falls,” Dottie said.

“So I've heard.”

“Personally I've never heard it,” Benchley said. “But if it starts speaking, Alan, you'll be the first to know.”

Back in his office, reading Conrad, Scott was unsure whether Ernest wanting to see him was good or not, and yet he was flattered that he'd asked after him. He liked to think he had a sensitivity to and unselfish reverence for talent—or was it just a weakness for success? All his life he'd been attracted to the great, hoping, through the most diligent exertion of his sensibility, he might earn his place among them. It was harder to believe now, and yet, if he could still count Ernest as a friend and rival, perhaps he wasn't the failure he accused himself of being. He'd never had any doubts about Ernest's powers, only his misapplication of them, a judgment he trusted was reciprocal.

Despite the air-conditioning,
Nostromo
was putting him to sleep. He needed a Coke and snuck out the side gate and across Culver to the drugstore. Waves of heat played over the trolley tracks and the road, making him think of summer in Montgomery, the shuttered houses and deep shadows beneath the trees. In the evenings he buttoned up his dress grays like the other young lieutenants and set off for the country club, where the local belles chose among them, dancing so close beneath the colored lanterns that their perfume clung to him through the next morning's inspection, a giddy memento. To always be favored so, that had been his dream as a young man. Walking the weedy block in the heat, knowing that on the third—or even fourth—floor of the Iron Lung someone was watching to see if he would come out of the drugstore with a bottle, he wondered when he'd stopped seeing life as a romantic proposition.

As if in answer, the same gray cat from before vaulted onto the windowsill of his house and, tail twitching, watched Scott pass.

“Hello, Mr. Ito. Yes, I agree, it's too hot.”

The store sold Gordon's, his brand. The price they were asking seemed high, as did his Coke and the Hershey bar he couldn't resist. Everything was inflated because of the location, right by the gate. He paid, declining a bag, and walked back across the street and the train tracks, the Coke bottle in his hand visible proof of his virtue.

The sugar gave him the lift he needed to get through the afternoon. Left alone in the cold room, he managed to sketch out the story of a reserve halfback who fumbles to lose the big game and becomes a campus outcast. He knew it was slight, a pat magazine piece, but it felt good to work, and when the siren blew at six he had four solid pages. Even more satisfying was the knowledge that today he'd made two hundred dollars.

He bade Eddie and Dottie and Alan and Oppy good night on the steps of the Iron Lung and turned up Main Street, against the tide of technicians and day players streaming for the gate. The studio was emptying out, like a city evacuating. The deeper he ventured into the lot, the fewer people he saw, until, taking a left on Fifth and passing beneath the water tower, he was alone. Above the door of Stage 11, a caged red light wheeled, warning away any intruder who might disturb the creation of the dream. The director was BEVINS, according to the slate, but exactly what production was a mystery, and though it was likely the shallowest of melodramas, starring actors he'd just witnessed chowing down meatloaf and chicken divan, he had to admit that from the outside the process still possessed a glamour and excitement he'd found nowhere else save Broadway. It was more than the simple collision of money and beauty, those commonest of ingredients. His late, lamented patron Thalberg knew what the robust L.B. Mayer never would. Gross as moving pictures were, in the best of them, as in the best writing, undeniably, there was life. Twice he'd journeyed west and failed to capture anything approaching that spirit. Now, standing outside the closed set, he resolved that instead of exile, he would accept his time here as a challenge.

His car was waiting, stifling inside. When he turned the key, nothing happened. He had gas, that wasn't the problem. He pulled out the choke, deliberately depressed the clutch to the floor. Nothing. He tried again, quickly this time, as if he might surprise the engine—in vain. He'd only owned the blasted thing a day. He thought of the salesman on Wilshire, saw him smile, sizing him up, an eastern rube in a wool suit. He rubbed his face with both hands as if he were washing, got out, slammed the door and, already sweating, started walking back to the main gate.

A
s soon as he pulled in he realized he'd been there before, at a mad party, the last time he'd been out here. The place was a Moorish variation on an L.A. staple, the square block of courtyard apartments. The swimming pool behind the main house was shaped like the Black Sea, an homage to Yalta, birthplace of the former owner, a kohl-eyed co-star of Valentino, fallen now, reduced to playing a lodger in her own home. True to its name, the landscaping aspired to an oasis, with nodding date palms, spindly eucalyptus and rampant bougainvillea attracting hummingbirds and butterflies and hiding the Garden from the outside world. Grouped around the pool like tourist cabins were Mission-style villas, white stucco with terra-cotta roofs. He remembered Tallulah Bankhead standing naked and sleek as a hood ornament at the end of the diving board, finishing her martini and regally handing the glass to her second before executing a perfect gainer, so like Zelda that even as he clapped, he mourned her. He couldn't recall if Benchley had been there, or Dottie. Possibly. There were years like phantoms, like fog. Often he wondered if certain memories of his had really taken place.

Benchley, in a coat and tie, was lounging by the pool with Humphrey Bogart and a jet-haired woman in a white one-piece who turned out not to be his wife—Mayo Methot, an actress Scott had never heard of. In his swim trunks Bogart looked like a muscled puppet, his head too large for his body. He hopped up to shake Scott's hand, taking it animatedly and turning his maniacal bad-guy smirk on him.

“Well, well, Scott Fitzgerald. You don't remember me, do you?”

“Of course—
The Petrified Forest
,” Scott said, noting that, though it was still technically morning, his breath carried the medicinal perfume of juniper. On the table between their chaises sat two highball glasses, an ice bucket and a crystal ashtray heaped with cigarette butts.

“The Cocoanut Grove?” Bogart prodded. “In the cloakroom?”

Scott could see the palm trees and Gus Arnheim's band playing on stage, the ceiling winking with false stars. Long ago they'd stayed at the Ambassador and danced there every night. This had been during Prohibition, and after a few weeks they'd been asked to leave. It had been Zelda's idea to take all the furniture in their room and make a big pile in the middle, crowning it with the unpaid bill.

“Sorry,” Scott said.

“You gave me this.” He turned his head and pointed to a white scar at the corner of his mouth no larger than a grain of rice.

“Supposedly,” Benchley said, “you were of the mind that someone had gone through your coat pockets.”

“I apologize. I'm sure I wasn't in my right mind.”

“That's all right, neither was I. As I recall, I got you pretty good too. Plus I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the story. For a while it was my one claim to fame.”

“It still is,” his girlfriend said broadly, obviously smashed. “I swear to God, he tells everybody we meet. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald split my lip.'”

“The thing is,” Bogart said, “before that I'd never read any of your stuff.”

“Just tell him and get it over with,” she said. “He thinks you're the greatest writer in the history of the world, blah-blah-blah.”

“I didn't say that!” he scolded her, then, theatrically, turned back to them, smiling again. “When Bench told me you were coming over, I just had to meet you and tell you how much I like your work, that's all.”

“Thank you,” Scott said. “I did enjoy you in
The Petrified Forest
.”

“That's kind of you to say, but really, I think
The Great Gatsby
is a masterpiece. ‘And so we all beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past.' That's the stuff, brother.”

He'd confused a few words and mucked up the rhythm, but, more flattered than embarrassed, Scott didn't correct him. Bogart offered him a drink, then when Benchley said they had to run, promised to buy him one sometime.

“He's between engagements,” Benchley explained on their way into the hills. He had an absurdly large Packard, bought with movie money, and was driving faster than Scott liked. The drop on his right was dizzying. On the horizon, across the hot plain of L.A., the sea was a dark blue line. He thought he could see Catalina. “She's permanently between engagements. When they're engaged with each other, it can get pretty loud. She has a gun. Sometimes we get to hear it. But good neighbors, salt of the earth.”

“Where's his wife?”

“On Broadway. She'll never leave New York. She's older, met him when he was just breaking in. I don't think she minds. They're actually a very charming couple, which might be the problem.”

“He likes a challenge.”

“Don't we all,” Benchley said.

If the slip was inadvertent, he didn't apologize, and in a larger sense it was true. What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

“By the way,” Benchley said. “Oppy?”

“Yes.”

“Never lend him money. He drops it on the nags.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“And don't bounce anything off him. He'll steal it. That's how he's hung around so long.”

“Got it.”

Ernest was staying with friends, was all Benchley would say, as if sworn to secrecy. It was typical, Scott thought, the needless intrigue. For years, to the delight of Condé Nast readers, Ernest had traveled the globe indulging his self-dramatizing streak, trying on swashbuckling costumes, while Scott stayed home, hoping to patch things together, a labor for which he discovered he had little talent. At one time they'd been equals, and happy to be, but the last few letters he'd received from Ernest had been dismissive, if not outright combative, and rather than reply in kind, he'd appealed to Max, thinking he might broker a peace between them. It hadn't happened, and as Benchley's pompous car climbed the curves, he felt a queasy mix of dread and self-righteousness, like a wronged party before a duel. If he was flattered by the invitation, he was also leery of an ambush.

They reached the top of Laurel Canyon and wound west on Mulholland, following the ridgeline several miles until Benchley turned down an unmarked, dusty spur lined with boulders. It dropped sharply, shadowed by tall pines, their sweet fragrance reaching in the windows. As they went, the air grew cooler, tinged with a clammy hint of ocean. After a last blind curve the road leveled off. They rocked along, passing rutted drives that disappeared into the forest. There were no signs, no mailboxes, no gates. They might have been deep in the Smokies except for the distant line of sea winking through the trees.

Knowing Ernest, he expected a gloomy stone hunting lodge decorated with heroic taxidermy, but the house below the end of the road was a glass box set into the hillside, overlooking the ocean. He imagined how much trouble bringing in everything to build it must have been, and pictured it at night, lit like an aquarium against the blackness. It was at once splendid and foolhardy, entirely incongruous, a home only someone in pictures would imagine. He and Benchley had to descend a flight of stairs steep as a slide to reach the door, and by then their host was waiting—Marlene Dietrich, in a plain white blouse and black skirt, like any hausfrau.

He was so used to her face from the screen that he was shocked to see the lines about her mouth. In real life, her famous bedroom eyes drooped, giving her the look of someone drugged or on the verge of passing out. He knew it was unfair—his own oft-photographed profile had long ago softened, his skin ceded the bloom of youth—yet he was disillusioned, as if all this time she'd been fooling him.

“I should warn you.”
Vahn
you. “He's not well. The doctor says he needs rest. He says he doesn't. So.”

They each declined her offer of a drink, though instantly, in retrospect, the novelty of being served by her appealed to Scott. She led them to the equivalent of a living room with an endless view, where Ernest, in striped briefs and a ribbed undershirt, balanced on a single crutch, his right shin swathed in a wasps' nest of gray bandages. He was heavier than Scott remembered, and hadn't shaved in a while, or washed his hair, it appeared, which was flat on one side as if he'd just woken up. She announced them brusquely and retreated to an unseen corner of the box.

“
Mi hermano
,” Ernest said, throwing an arm wide, and Scott crossed to him. Instead of a handshake, Ernest embraced him, kissing one cheek and then the other. His breath was foul—not with drink, but rotten, as if he had an abscessed tooth. “You look well.”

“I'd say the same but I'd be lying.”

Ernest subsided into his chair, swinging his leg onto a hassock. “What did she tell you?”

“You're supposed to be resting.”

“Lousy Krauts—all they do is give orders. It's just a blood clot. They operated on it over there and didn't get it all.”

“Red badge of courage?” Benchley asked.

“Our hotel was being shelled and I tried to hide under a desk. Bumped my head too.” He pulled back his greasy bangs to show a yellow-and-grape egg. “And that's how I won the war.”

“I hope you at least had room service,” Benchley said.

“No food, no water and no ammunition. Otherwise things were ducky.”

“Which is why you're here,” Scott said.

“I'd rather be there. The whole thing's been bitched since New York. The cops shut us down in Boston. They didn't even let us into Chicago. You'd think it wouldn't be a hard sell, with the Krauts involved.”

“The country's not in the mood to buy a used war,” Benchley said. “Another one, I should say.”

“First off,” Scott said, “they don't have the money.”

“They're going to have to buy it sometime, and the price is just going up.”

“I agree,” Scott said. “But they're not going to buy it from the Reds.”

“We will,” Benchley said. “New York and Hollywood.”

“Might as well be the Reds to the rest of the country,” Scott said.

“I know,” Ernest said. “And no one wants to back the wrong horse.”

“Is it the wrong horse?”

“It's the right horse,” Ernest said. “Just the wrong time.”

“I don't see how being anti-Fascist can be premature,” Benchley said.

“It's tough,” Ernest said. “All we can do is hope we lose well enough so people will be ready the next time.”

Scott looked to Benchley to see if he'd heard him correctly. Benchley sat with his arms crossed, biting his lip.

“It'll all be over by spring, no matter what we do. Then it'll be someone else's turn.”

“Austria,” Scott said.

“Very good,” Ernest said.

“Thank you.”

“Which is why I wanted to talk with you. I hear you're going to be working on
Three Comrades
for Metro.”

Scott didn't know why, but how he'd heard so quickly frightened him. It wasn't out of the question that Ernest knew Eddie Knopf, or that Eddie had run it by some of the other producers. Maybe all of Hollywood knew, via rumor, and naturally he, the unwitting subject, heard it last.

“Nothing's settled yet.”

“If you do,” Ernest said, “do me a favor and remember Spain.”

“I will.”

“You know the first movie Hitler banned?”

“All Quiet on the Western Front,”
Scott said, making the connection plain.

“They'll do everything they can to stop this one, or gut it,” Ernest said. “There's an attaché from the German consulate named Reinecke who screens everything before it goes to the foreign distributors. He's basically their censor for Europe.”

“Don't the studios have final say?” Even as Scott said it, he realized how naive he sounded. Like any leaders who ruled through and solely for money, when threatened, the studio heads were geniuses at appeasement.

“Thalberg had final cut on everything,” Benchley reminded him.

“You know how to get things past an editor,” Ernest said. “That's your strength, making heavy things seem light—not like me. I couldn't write a
Saturday Evening Post
story to save my life.”

You've never had to, Scott thought.

“Just be aware,” Ernest said, “that certain people are going to be very interested in what you're doing.”

“That's good to know,” he said, though, knowing how powerless he was, he felt he'd been given an impossible assignment.

They ate on a terrace noisy with birdsong, commanding a broad view of the sea. Dietrich served them cold trout and salad and went back into the house, from time to time peering out of the kitchen window like a servant. Scott had ice water rather than the Mosel.

“On the wagon—good for you,” Ernest said, toasting him. “I'll be joining you in a few months if it's any comfort.”

“It's not,” Scott said cheerily, toasting him back.

As they were saying good-bye at the bottom of the stairs, while Benchley was gushing at Dietrich about the lunch, Ernest discreetly asked after Zelda.

Scott shrugged. “No better, no worse.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you.” He didn't ask after Hadley, or the new Mrs. Hemingway, just returned his embrace and said he'd see him tonight. Afraid of seeming familiar, he reached to take Dietrich's hand. She drew him to her like an old friend. She smelled of lilacs, and the silk of her hair against his skin made him shiver. In the car he wanted to ask Benchley if that had happened to him, but didn't.

He was glad to have seen Ernest, because that night they barely had time to say hello. Fredric March's place in Beverly Hills was a timbered mock Tudor mansion complete with formal gardens and classical statuary. There, nibbling hors d'oeuvres and sipping cocktails passed by Filipino servants, they honored the brave Spanish peasants by talking shop and writing checks. For Hollywood it was an oddly homely bunch. The only star he ran into besides their host was Gary Cooper, who stood a foot taller than anyone in the room. The rest were older—balding, bespectacled gnomes: writers and directors and composers, most of them Jews, recent émigrés from the continent. In a last-ditch act of self-interest, half a millennium after the Inquisition, the refugees were taking up a collection to save their persecutors.