The Love of the Last Tycoon

"Poor old Sambo," she said.

  "What?"

  "Don't you call them poor old Sambo?"

  "We don't call them anything especially." After a moment, he said, "They have pictures of their own."

  In the house she drew on her shoes and stockings before the heater.

  "I like California better," she said deliberately. "I think I was a bit sex-starved."

  "That wasn't quite all, was it?"

  "You know it wasn't."

  "It's nice to be near you."

  She gave a little sigh as she stood up, so small that he did not notice it.

  "I don't want to lose you now," he said. "I don't know what you think of me or whether you think of me at all. As you've probably guessed, my heart's in the grave--" He hesitated, wondering if this was quite true. "--but you're the most attractive woman I've met since I don't know when. I can't stop looking at you. I don't know now exactly the color of your eyes, but they make me sorry for everyone in the world---"

  "Stop it, stop it!" she cried laughing. "You'll have me looking in the mirror for weeks. My eyes aren't any color--they're just eyes to see with, and I'm just as ordinary as I can be. I have nice teeth for an English girl---"

  "You have beautiful teeth."

  "--but I couldn't hold a candle to these girls I see here---"

  "You stop it," he said. "What I said is true, and I'm a cautious man."

  She stood motionless a moment--thinking. She looked at him, then she looked back into herself, then at him again--then she gave up her thought.

  "We must go," she said.

  Now they were different people as they started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind them now; this was a true returning--to themselves and all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. He asked her to sit close in the car, and she did, but they did not seem close, because for that you have to seem to be growing closer. Nothing stands still. It was on his tongue to ask her to come to the house he rented and sleep there tonight--but he felt that it would make him sound lonely. As the car climbed the hill to her house, Kathleen looked for something behind the seat cushion.

  "What have you lost?"

  "It might have fallen out," she said, feeling through her purse in the darkness.

  "What was it?"

  "An envelope."

  "Was it important?"

  "No."

  But when they got to her house and Stahr turned on the dashboard light, she helped take the cushions out and look again.

  "It doesn't matter," she said, as they walked to the door. "What's your address where you really live?"

  "Just Bel-air. There's no number."

  "Where is Bel-air?"

  "It's a sort of development, near Santa Monica. But you'd better call me at the studio."

  "All right...good night, Mr. Stahr."

  "Mister Stahr," he repeated, astonished.

  She corrected herself gently.

  "Well, then, good night, Stahr. Is that better?"

  He felt as though he had been pushed away a little.

  "As you like," he said. He refused to let the aloofness communicate itself. He kept looking at her and moved his head from side to side in her own gesture, saying without words: "You know what's happened to me." She sighed. Then she came into his arms and for a moment was his again completely. Before anything could change, Stahr whispered good night and turned away and went to his car.

  Winding down the hill, he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently, but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto horns from the technicolor boulevards below, or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass--this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score.

  Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the negro on the sand. He was waiting at home for Stahr, with his pails of silver fish, and he would be waiting at the studio in the morning. He had said that he did not allow his children to listen to Stahr's story. He was prejudiced and wrong, and he must be shown somehow, some way. A picture, many pictures, a decade of pictures, must be made to show him he was wrong. Since he had spoken, Stahr had thrown four pictures out of his plans--one that was going into production this week. They were borderline pictures in point of interest, but at least he submitted the borderline pictures to the negro and found them trash. And he put back on his list a difficult picture that he had tossed to the wolves, to Brady and Marcus and the rest, to get his way on something else. He rescued it for the negro man.

  When he drove up to his door, the porch lights went on, and his Philippino came down the steps to put away the car. In the library, Stahr found a list of phone calls:

  "La Borwitz

  Marcus

  Harlow

  Reinmund

  Fairbanks

  Brady

  Colman

  Skouras

  Fleishacker," etc.

  The Philippino came into the room with a letter.

  "This fell out of the car," he said.

  "Thanks," said Stahr. "I was looking for it."

  "Will you be running a picture tonight, Mr. Stahr?"

  "No, thanks--you can go to bed."

  The letter, to his surprise, was addressed to Monroe Stahr, Esq. He started to open it--then it occurred to him that she had wanted to recapture it, and possibly to withdraw it. If she had had a phone, he would have called her for permission before opening it. He held it for a moment. It had been written before they met--it was odd to think that whatever it said was now invalidated; it possessed the interest of a souvenir by representing a mood that was gone.

  Still he did not like to read it without asking her. He put it down beside a pile of scripts and sat down with the top script in his lap. He was proud of resisting his first impulse to open the letter. It seemed to prove that he was not "losing his head." He had never lost his head about Minna, even in the beginning--it had been the most appropriate and regal match imaginable. She had loved him always and just before she died, all unwilling and surprised, his tenderness had burst and surged forward and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and death together--with the world in which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there.

  But "falling for dames" had never been an obsession--his brother had gone to pieces over a dame, or rather over dame after dame after dame. But Stahr, in his younger days, had them once and never more than once--like one drink. He had quite another sort of adventure reserved for his mind--something better than a series of emotional sprees. Like many brilliant men, he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve, probably, with the total rejection common to those of extraordinary mental powers, the "See here: this is all wrong--a mess--all a lie--and a sham--," he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do; and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are, he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself, "This will never do." And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection like lessons.

  The Philippino boy brought in a carafe of water and bowls of nuts and fruit, and said good night. Stahr opened the first script and began to read.

  He read for three hours--stopping from time to time, editing without a pencil. Sometimes he looked up, warm from some vague happy thought that was not in the script, and it took him a minute each time to remember what it was. Then he knew it was Kathleen, and he looked at the letter--it was nice to have a letter.

  It was three o'clock when a vein began to bump in the back of his hand, signalling that it was time to quit. Ka
thleen was really far away now with the waning night--the different aspects of her telescoped into the memory of a single thrilling stranger, bound to him only by a few slender hours. It seemed perfectly all right to open the letter.

  "Dear Mr. Stahr.

  "In half an hour I will be keeping my date with you. When we say goodbye I will hand you this letter. It is to tell you that I am to be married soon and that I won't be able to see you after today.

  "I should have told you last night but it didn't seem to concern you. And it would seem silly to spend this beautiful afternoon telling you about it and watching your interest fade. Let it fade all at once--now. I will have told you enough to convince you that I am Nobody's Prize Potato. (I have just learned that expression--from my hostess of last night, who called and stayed an hour. She seems to believe that everyone is Nobody's Prize Potato--except you. I think I am supposed to tell you she thinks this, so give her a job if you can.) "I am very flattered that anyone who sees so many lovely women--I can't finish this sentence but you know what I mean. And I will be late if I don't go to meet you right now.

  "With All Good Wishes

  "KATHLEEN MOORE."

  Stahr's first feeling was like fear; his first thought was that the letter was invalidated--she had even tried to retrieve it. But then he remembered "Mister Stahr" just at the end, and that she had asked him his address--she had probably already written another letter which would also say goodbye. Illogically he was shocked by the letter's indifference to what had happened later. He read it again, realizing that it foresaw nothing. Yet in front of the house she had decided to let it stand, belittling everything that had happened, curving her mind away from the fact that there had been no other man in her consciousness that afternoon. But he could not even believe this now, and the whole adventure began to peel away even as he recapitulated it searchingly to himself. The car, the hill, the hat, the music, the letter itself, blew off like the scraps of tar paper from the rubble of his house. And Kathleen departed, packing up her remembered gestures, her softly moving head, her sturdy eager body, her bare feet in the wet swirling sand. The skies paled and faded--the wind and rain turned dreary, washing the silver fish back to sea. It was only one more day, and nothing was left except the pile of scripts upon the table.

  He went upstairs. Minna died again on the first landing, and he forgot her lingeringly and miserably again, step by step to the top. The empty floor stretched around him--the doors with no one sleeping behind. In his room, Stahr took off his tie, untied his shoes and sat on the side of his bed. It was all closed out, except for something that he could not remember; then he remembered: her car was still down in the parking lot of the hotel. He set his clock to give him six hours' sleep.

  This is Cecilia taking up the story. I think it would be most interesting to follow my own movements at this point, as this is a time in my life that I am ashamed of. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

  When I sent Wylie over to Martha Dodd's table, he had no success in finding out who the girl was, but it had suddenly become my chief interest in life. Also, I guessed--correctly--that it would be Martha Dodd's. To have had at your table a girl who is admired by royalty, who may be tagged for a coronet in our little feudal system--and not even know her name!

  I had only a speaking acquaintance with Martha, and it would be too obvious to approach her directly, but I went out to the studio Monday and dropped in on Jane Meloney.

  Jane Meloney was quite a friend of mine. I thought of her rather as a child thinks of a family dependent. I knew she was a writer, but I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails and came more often to meals. They were spoken of the same way when they were not around--except for a species called playwrights, who came from the East. These were treated with respect if they did not stay long--if they did, they sank with the others into the white collar class.

  Jane's office was in the "old writers' building." There was one on every lot, a row of iron maidens left over from silent days and still resounding with the dull moans of cloistered hacks and bums. There was the story of the new producer who had gone down the line one day and then reported excitedly to the head office.

  "Who are those men?"

  "They're supposed to be writers."

  "I thought so. Well, I watched them for ten minutes and there were two of them that didn't write a line."

  Jane was at her typewriter, about to break off for lunch. I told her frankly that I had a rival.

  "It's a dark horse," I said. "I can't even find out her name."

  "Oh," said Jane. "Well, maybe I know something about that. I heard something from somebody."

  The somebody, of course, was her nephew, Ned Sollinger, Stahr's office boy. He had been her pride and hope. She had sent him through New York University, where he played on the football team. Then in his first year at medical school, after a girl turned him down, he dissected out the least publicized section of a lady corpse and sent it to the girl. Don't ask me why. In disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, he had begun life at the bottom again, and was still there.

  "What do you know?" I asked.

  "It was the night of the earthquake. She fell into the lake on the back lot, and he dove in and saved her life. Someone else told me it was his balcony she jumped off of and broke her arm."

  "Who was she?"

  "Well, that's funny, too--"

  Her phone rang, and I waited restlessly during a long conversation she had with Joe Reinmund. He seemed to be trying to find out over the phone how good she was or whether she had ever written any pictures at all. And she was reputed to have been on the set the day Griffith invented the close-up! While he talked she groaned silently, writhed, made faces into the receiver, held it all in her lap so that the voice reached her faintly--and kept up a side chatter to me.

  "What is he doing--killing time between appointments? ... He's asked me every one of these questions ten times...that's all on a memorandum I sent him."...

  And into the phone:

  "If this goes up to Monroe, it won't be my doing. I want to go right through to the end."

  She shut her eyes in agony again.

  "Now he's casting it...he's casting the minor characters...he's going to have Buddy Ebson.... My God, he just hasn't anything to do...now he's on Walter Davenport--he means Donald Crisp...he's got a big casting directory open in his lap and I can hear him turn the pages...he's a big important man this morning, a second Stahr, and for Christ sake I've got two scenes to do before lunch."

  Reinmund quit finally or was interrupted at his end. A waiter came in from the commissary with Jane's luncheon and a Coca-Cola for me--I wasn't lunching that summer. Jane wrote down one sentence on her typewriter before she ate. It interested me the way she wrote. One day I was there when she and a young man had just lifted a story out of The Saturday Evening Post--changing the characters and all. Then they began to write it, making each line answer the line before it, and of course it sounded just like people do in life when they're straining to be anything--funny or gentle or brave. I always wanted to see that one on the screen, but I missed it somehow.

  I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She made three thousand a week, and her husbands all drank and beat her nearly to death. But today I had an axe to grind.

  "You don't know her name?" I persisted.

  "Oh--" said Jane, "that. Well, he kept calling her up afterwards, and he told Katy Doolan it was the wrong name, after all."

  "I think he found her," I said. "Do you know Martha Dodd?"

  "Hasn't that little girl had a tough break, though!" she exclaimed with ready theatrical sympathy.

  "Could you possibly invite her to lunch tomorrow?"

  "Oh, I think she gets enough to eat all right. There's a Mexican--"

  I explained that my motives were not charitable. Jane agreed to cooperate. She called Martha Dodd.

  *

  We had lunch next day at
the Bev Brown Derby, a languid restaurant, patronized for its food by clients who always look as if they'd like to lie down. There is some animation at lunch, where the women put on a show for the first five minutes after they eat, but we were a tepid threesome. I should have come right out with my curiosity. Martha Dodd was an agricultural girl, who had never quite understood what had happened to her and had nothing to show for it except a washed-out look about the eyes. She still believed that the life she had tasted was reality and this was only a long waiting.

  "I had a beautiful place in 1928," she told us, "--thirty acres, with a miniature gold course and a pool and a gorgeous view. All spring I was up to my ass in daisies."

  I ended by asking her to come over and meet Father. This was pure penance for having had "a mixed motive" and being ashamed of it. One doesn't mix motives in Hollywood--it is confusing. Everybody understands, and the climate wears you down. A mixed motive is conspicuous waste.

  Jane left us at the studio gate, disgusted by my cowardice. Martha had worked up inside to a pitch about her career--not a very high pitch, because of seven years of neglect, but a sort of nervous acquiescence, and I was going to speak strongly to Father. They never did anything for people like Martha, who had made them so much money at one time. They let them slip away into misery eked out with extra work--it would have been kinder to ship them out of town. And Father was being so proud of me this summer. I had to keep him from telling everybody just how I had been brought up so as to produce such a perfect jewel. And Bennington--oh, what an exclusive--dear God, my heart. I assured him there was the usual proportion of natural-born skivvies and biddies tastefully concealed by throw-overs from sex Fifth Avenue; but Father had worked himself up to practically an alumnus. "You've had everything," he used to say happily. Everything included roughly the two years in Florence, where I managed against heavy odds to be the only virgin in school, and the courtesy debut in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a veritable flower of the fine old cost-and-gross aristocracy.

  So I knew he would do something for Martha Dodd, and as we went into his office, I had great dreams of doing something for Johnny Swanson, the cowboy, too, and Evelyn Brent, and all sorts of discarded flowers. Father was a charming and sympathetic man--except for that time I had seen him unexpectedly in New York--and there was something touching about his being my father. After all, he was my father--he would do anything in the world for me.