Marjorie Morningstar

  Marjorie was gasping, holding her hand over her pounding chest. “Mr. Flamm—is there a part—a chance for a part?”

  He thrust the script into her hands. “I don’t want to be cruel and say there’s even a chance. Read the play, that’s all.” His voice was shaking a little. “This is the theatre, so anything can happen, even a break like this. But I’m promising nothing. You may be terrible as Clarice. Now this play, remember, isn’t Shaw. Forget about your college dramatics, dear. This is Broadway, and this play is money, plain old commercial money. How quick a study are you? Are you willing to come back tomorrow and risk a reading? All or nothing, your one chance at Clarice? Tomorrow at this time?”

  “Yes, yes! Oh, God, Mr. Flamm, I’ll be here.”

  She stumbled out of the dank building into the sunshine with the script under her arm. The feeling of unreality was as strong as it had been on the night of her uncle’s death; but this was a dream as sweet and beautiful as that had been horrible. She tried to read the first page on the sidewalk, but sunlight glaring on the white paper blinded her. She ran to a sandwich shop across the street, ordered coffee and cake, and began to read the play. The pages looked pink after the sun glare. It was hard to concentrate at first, there was so much excitement in holding a professionally typed and bound script, with its character names in upper-case letters. (JOHN walks in. HE is a young man of thirty, dressed for tennis. HE crosses to the mirror, L.) The cover of the script was a peculiarly tough rippled paper, bright scarlet, bound to the pages with brass fasteners. The title of the play was Down Two Doubled.

  The first few pages made little sense. She could not get her mind calmed. Bolting her coffee and cake, and lighting a cigarette, she read on. She had read perhaps forty pages when she began to suspect that the fault might not lie in her agitation. The play seemed to be unspeakably stupid trash. The dialogue was silly, the characters vague, the action feebly meandering. She forced herself to read on, trying desperately to concentrate. The further she read, the worse it got.

  After a while she decided that it was simply not possible to read Down Two Doubled. It was worse than a legal document. She flipped the pages until she came to a stage direction reading (Enter CLARICE. SHE is a beautiful dark-haired girl aged 18. AMANDA and TONY jump up from the couch in amazement at HER appearance).

  Clarice was as nebulous as the other characters. Her lines were weak facetious echoes of a style of college slang ten years outmoded. The play was about two young couples, rival tournament bridge teams, who went through complex bedroom intrigues in order to get at each other’s bidding signals. Clarice was the younger sister of one of the wives. She came from college for the weekend, exposed the intrigues, and outplayed all the experts in a bridge game on stage. This was as much as Marjorie could extract from the tangled fog of words called Down Two Doubled.

  The disappointment was sickening. Had Guy Flamm decayed into a harmless old lunatic? Yet she had seen his name in the Times theatre gossip quite recently. Had he written this gibberish himself? Or was her judgment so worthless, so warped by collegiate idealism, that she couldn’t perceive the possibilities in a commercial script? She had a frantic impulse to telephone Noel; he could read this play in half an hour, and give her an unerring estimate. She went to the phone booth, dropped in the nickel, and then balked. Her dear wish was to surprise him, knock him over, with the news that she had a part in a Broadway play. She got back the nickel, looked up the number of Hunter College, and called Miss Kimble.

  The music teacher became almost hysterical when Marjorie said Flamm had given her a script. Marjorie interrupted the foam of congratulations. “I’d like to see you about it, right away, if I can.” Miss Kimble fluttered and stammered about all the work she had to do, and finally told Marjorie to come at once by all means; she would put everything else aside even if it meant losing her job.

  It was queer to arrive at the college at eleven-thirty in the morning. Miss Kimble fell on Marjorie’s neck, and kissed her, and blew her nose, and looked red-eyed, and locked her door. She stared at the script with frightening eagerness. “Is that—is that it?”

  “I’d like you to read it. Not necessarily all of it. One act ought to be enough, Miss Kimble. But right away—”

  “Of course I will, Marjorie. I’m at your service, dear. I’m the stepping-stone, the ladder, and proud of it. And call me Dora, for heaven’s sake, everybody in the theatre does.” Her fingers worked toward the script. Marjorie hastily handed it to her. “Down Two Doubled. Exciting title. Oh, my! Isn’t Guy a dear? And he’s brilliant—”

  “Miss—Dora, suppose I take a walk or something? I’ve got to have your opinion. Suppose I come back in an hour?”

  “Perfect. Perfect. Run along, dear.” Eyes agleam, Miss Kimble was already immersed in the play.

  When Marjorie returned, having smoked so many cigarettes and drunk so much drugstore coffee that she was shaking, she found Miss Kimble less excited. “Sit down, dear,” the teacher said, pursing her lips and smoothing her brown tweed skirt. The script lay closed on her desk.

  “How much did you read—Dora?”

  “I finished it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well—it has definite possibilities.”

  “Really? Is that your honest opinion?”

  “Marjorie, Guy Flamm is an awfully shrewd man. He’s been in the theatre a long time. If he likes a script it must have values—”

  “But did you like it?”

  “Well, frankly, it’s slightly confusing at a first reading, and of course I just raced through it.”

  “Dora, isn’t it utter and hopeless garbage?”

  The music teacher looked offended. “Marjorie, the first thing you’ll have to learn in the theatre is not to make snap judgments. It’s a commercial comedy. That kind of script is full of hidden values, very often. Look at Abie’s Irish Rose. You can’t see them, and I can’t see them, but Guy Flamm sees them. Tell me, did he remember me at all?”

  “Oh yes. Spoke very highly of you.”

  The music teacher blushed and fumbled at the glasses on her desk. “We had a lot of fun that summer with Blossom Time—Well. What role is he considering you for?”

  “Clarice.”

  “Why, that’s the best part.”

  “I can’t make head or tail of it, Dora. It’s just words. She has no character. She doesn’t talk like a person. She’s just the result of some imbecile pecking at a typewriter for a while. I’m sorry, Dora, that’s how it strikes me.”

  Miss Kimble put on her glasses, and with them her classroom authority and severity. “I think you lack a sense of proportion, possibly, a teeny bit, Marjorie. What did you expect? You’ve been out of college one day. Did you expect to be cast as Juliet or Candida today by the Theatre Guild?”

  “No, but I—”

  “Guy Flamm is offering you a chance to act. To walk out on a Broadway stage, for God’s sake! You should go down on your knees in gratitude to him. And to me, although that doesn’t matter in the least. If he gave you just a walk-on, just two lines as a maid in a dismal flop—”

  “Dora, I’m terribly grateful to you, it isn’t that—”

  “You’ve had the most fantastic luck I’ve ever heard of. Grab it, you fool. You’re supposed to be an actress. Make something of Clarice, even if she is just a lot of words from a typewriter. Get out on the stage.”

  Marjorie took the script from the desk. “Well, you’ve certainly made me feel like a worm.”

  Miss Kimble was upon her, hugging her, diffusing pine fragrance. “Marjorie, no. Don’t take it to heart. Or rather, do! It was just a pep talk, but I mean it. Dear, it’s a chance, don’t you see, it’s a start.”

  Marjorie went home and studied the script all afternoon and all evening. She turned out her bed lamp at midnight, and tossed for hours, with Clarice’s vapid lines tumbling fragmented in her mind.

  Flamm’s fat secretary, still drinking coffee and still chewing on a bun, greeted Marjorie
next morning with an astoundingly pleasant smile, and told her to go right in.

  Another red script lay before Flamm on his desk. He was still mopping the eye, which looked worse. Today he wore a blue checked shirt, a blue bow tie, and a blue sports jacket. “Not a word,” he said, as Marjorie started to greet him. “Take off your coat. Forget that Marjorie Morgenstern ever lived. You’re Clarice Talley.” She sat in the chair, clutching her script. “One question. Do you think you understand the play?”

  “I—yes, Mr. Flamm.”

  “Which adjective would you say best describes it—sentimental, romantic, raffish, brittle, gay?”

  “Well—gay, and slightly raffish.”

  Flamm’s eyes bulged like a lobster’s, and he smiled. Then, looking stern, he flipped open the script. “Act 2, page 41,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  It took twenty minutes to read through Clarice’s scene. Marjorie was damp with perspiration when it was over. She could not tell whether she had read the drivelling lines well or badly. She had tried to convey innocence and mischievous charm with her voice and her face.

  Flamm deliberately closed the script, turned his back on her, and looked out of the window. Three or four minutes went by. He whirled as he had yesterday, his whole face alight. “I’m sorry. I should send you home, let you stew for a few days—here it is, between the eyes. I’m in business, after an eight-month search. You’re Clarice! Bless your heart. We start rehearsals a week from Monday. We open in New Haven March 15.”

  Marjorie broke down and cried. He stood over her, patting her shoulder. She said, “I’m sorry, it’s silly—”

  “Not at all, Marjorie. I feel like crying myself.” He gave her a cigarette and she calmed. He talked a while about wonderfully exciting details: costumes, rehearsal schedules, hotel rooms in New Haven. She could hardly follow, so stunned with delight was she. She said, “Yes, yes, Mr. Flamm,” and kept nodding, thinking deliriously of how she would break the news to her parents and to Noel.

  Somehow, after ten minutes or so, Flamm was on the subject of his brother, a Colorado mining engineer, for whom he had countersigned a note in connection with some mining equipment. The story was extremely complicated, but the upshot of it was that he had had to pay ten thousand dollars, which his brother would unquestionably repay in six months, since his contract was with Anaconda Copper, a client more reliable than the U. S. Government.

  “Meantime, of course, it’s a devilish nuisance,” Flamm said. “In fact, that’s the only possible snag here. It happens that Broadway money is the tightest it’s been in all my experience. Why, Kaufman and Hart are having trouble raising money for their new play. Had I known—Well, we’ll just have to raise the money somehow.”

  He paused, and not knowing what to say, she nodded brightly. He talked some more about New Haven arrangements. Then he said, “Of course, if you know someone who has ten thousand to invest in a surefire comedy and who wants to see you get ahead—the return on a hit is a thousand cents on the dollar, you know, easily, and now that I’ve got my Clarice I’ve got a hit for sure—”

  “Golly, Mr. Flamm, I don’t know a soul with that kind of money. Ten thousand! I wish I did.”

  “Well, of course, in the theatre we usually parcel these things out—five thousand here, five thousand there.”

  She shook her head, smiling. He said, “Well, silly as it sounds, at the moment this may make the difference between our going into rehearsal or not. Six months from now brother Bart will give me the money, of course. In fact, I’ll gladly secure any investor with a personal guarantee against loss, countersigned by my brother. That’s how sure I am of this play. But you see, six months from now my cast may be dispersed, you may be sick, I may be sick—” He mopped his eye.

  “I’m sorry, I wish I did know somebody—gosh—”

  “Well, actually, the plan I’ve worked out is four equal shares, twenty-five hundred each—don’t you think your father, for instance, I’m sure he’s anxious to see you get launched in a part like Clarice—after all, an importer—he’d probably never miss twenty-five hundred dollars, and then there’s the fun of watching rehearsals, and all—”

  At the words “your father,” a wave of sickness went over Marjorie. Staring at Flamm and shaking her head, she put the script on his desk.

  “How about a thousand dollars, then? Surely a thousand, for an importer—”

  “Mr. Flamm,” she said huskily, “my father hates the theatre. He doesn’t believe in it. My father won’t invest in your play. I’m sorry. It’s impossible.”

  He mopped his eye. The friendliness and excitement were gone from his face. He said, wearily and dryly, “Well, Marjorie, as I say, you’re a talented girl, but let’s face it, you’re a complete newcomer. If I’m to stake my reputation on launching you, it seems to me it’s not asking much of your father to show his confidence in you to the extent of five hundred or a thousand dollars.”

  She was blindly putting on her coat. “Goodbye, Mr. Flamm.” Her hand was on the doorknob.

  He said, “I mean, for five hundred or a thousand I can’t give you Clarice, but the maid’s part would be yours. Well, goodbye. As I say, you have talent, though it’s raw—”

  Dazed, wretched, she went home on the subway. She was lying on her bed face down, unmindful of the way she was crumpling the red dress, when the telephone rang. “Marjorie? Hi!” Noel’s voice had a striking lift in it. “Missed me? How about having lunch with me at the Ritz-Carlton?”

  She sat up. “The—the Ritz-Carlton? Noel, you can’t afford it—”

  “Who can’t? You’re talking to a twenty-five-thousand-a-year man. Now hurry!”

  Chapter 23. THE NEW NOEL

  “Hello!” she said. “Good Lord, look at you.”

  The change in him was startling. He wore a new pin-stripe black suit, black shoes, a white shirt with a short pinned collar, and a gray silk tie. His hair was trimmed close, and the color in his face was remarkably fresh. “Come along, I’ve ordered the lunch already.” The headwaiter bowed them to a conspicuously empty table in the middle of the crowded wood-panelled room.

  Marjorie was very ill at ease. All the women in the room looked bitingly smart: Paris hats, tailored suits, elegant hair-dos were everywhere. She wore no hat, her hair fell loosely to her shoulders (this had been an effort to look like Clarice), and the red dress was a truly horrible blunder. She had been too prostrated by the Flamm fiasco to think of changing when she left the house. The glances of the men were the usual thing, but the glances of the women, which really mattered in such a place, were disdainful and slightly amused. “I look like a streetwalker in here,” she muttered to Noel as they sat.

  “Hardly,” he said. “As it happens, several of the town’s most eminent streetwalkers are around us, and as you see, they look quite different.”

  “That headwaiter treats you like a long-lost friend.”

  “I’ve been here often, dear.”

  “Not since I’ve known you.”

  “That’s right. It’s been a lean stretch, too. You don’t have the price.” He laughed at her vexed look. “Gad, it’s fun to torment you. It’s true, though, that on occasion the lady’s paid. Usually some lady I’ve gone broke for, first.”

  “Don’t you find it humiliating?”

  “Not in the least. I sit and calculate how many Automat meals I’m saving, by not paying the check.”

  “You’re a hoodlum. I hope you’re not counting on my paying this time.”

  “You, dear?”

  “Well, what’s going on here, then? Why the prosperous getup? Why are you looking seventeen years old? What’s all this about twenty-five thousand a year?”

  “I went to work this morning.”

  “Where? What kind of job?”

  “Paramount Pictures.” The waiter set two champagne cocktails on the table. “Ah, here we are. You’ll drink to the new Noel, won’t you? He’s your creation, as much as anybody’s.”

  Marjorie picked up her
glass, looking at him suspiciously. “Paramount! Are you serious?” He nodded. “As a writer? Are you going to Hollywood?”

  His lips were compressed in amusement. “No, dear. You’re not losing me, don’t be tragic. Drink up. Here’s death to the old Noel, that seedy bum, and long life to the new, eh?”

  She smiled, in a half-disbelieving way, and drank.

  Noel said, “Why are you so amazed? I’ve told you about Sam Rothmore, one time or another, haven’t I?”

  “The rich old man you play chess with?”

  “That’s the one. Didn’t I mention that he’s with Paramount?”

  “I don’t think so—”

  “Well he is. And he loves me, the sad old bastard. He must be the lonesomest man in town. No children, and his wife’s a year-round invalid in Florida. He’s one of the heads of the New York office. Puts on a tough-guy act, but he’s really pretty softhearted. Practically supports the chess club I play at, and a couple of Jewish old folks’ homes in the Bronx, that kind of thing. Fine taste in painting and music, very good Mozart collection and—well, I’ve told you about the paintings, I’m sure. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in his library with him, listening to music and playing chess, and drinking the best brandy on earth. Frankly, and this is probably not nice of me, he gets to be an awful bore after a while. I can’t say why. I guess all lonesome people are pathetic and boring, no matter who they are. So damn grateful for your company, you know, so reluctant to let you go. Anyway, Sam’s clapped a harness on me at last. I’m breaking in as assistant story editor at a hundred twenty a week, and then—”