At this point the queen of publicity interposed: “Mr. Budd, have you ever met Mr. Hearst?”
“I have never had that pleasure,” was the reply. “I missed him on his trip to Paris a couple of years ago.”
“He was greatly impressed by both Göring and Hitler.”
“So I have been told, and the feeling was reciprocated. Hermann and Adi are both remarkable men, and Mr. Hearst is one who would be able to appreciate them.”
“I think he would be interested to hear your account of them.”
“I should be honored to meet him, Miss Parsons—and especially if I had your recommendation.”
That was all that was said, but after the party broke up the genial Genie remarked: “You made a hit with Louella—and believe me that isn’t easy for anybody who monopolizes the conversation!” The hostess was bubbling with satisfaction, for her party had been a success, and she was sure it would get a fat paragraph in the morning. The game of publicity hunting is like the pinball device which you see in drugstores and poolrooms; you invest a lot of money, but it is only rarely that you hit the jackpot.
X
At ten o’clock next morning, after Lanny had finished his bath and his breakfast and his Los Angeles Examiner, the telephone rang in his hotel room. “Is this Mr. Lanny Budd? This is Louella Parsons.”
“Oh, good morning, Miss Parsons. I have just read what you wrote about me in your column. It is very kind of you indeed.”
“I write what I think. If you had been a chatterbox I would have said so—or I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“Thank you, Miss Parsons.”
“I have just talked with Mr. Hearst. He would be pleased if you would visit him. He invites you for lunch today and to spend the week-end at San Simeon.”
“But—how can I get there by lunchtime?”
“You will fly. His plane leaves the Burbank airport at eleven-thirty. There will be other passengers, so don’t be late.”
“I’ll do my best, you may be sure.”
“You won’t need formal clothes; the place is called ‘The Ranch.’ Bear in mind that all guests are expected in the Great Hall every evening, and all are expected to witness the motion picture show with the Chief. No drinking is permitted in the private rooms.”
“I do not drink, Miss Parsons, except when my host expects it.”
“Mr. Hearst does not drink, either. There is one more rule that is imperative—no one ever mentions the subject of death in his presence.”
“I will bear these admonitions in mind.”
“If you do, you will have an enjoyable experience, and if the Chief likes you, you may stay as long as you wish.”
“I am most grateful for your kindness, Miss Parsons.”
“You may prove your gratitude by giving me any items that are suitable for my column. All my friends do that.”
“I shall be truly glad to be enlisted among your friends.”
So that was that; Lanny had accomplished his purpose in some thirty-six hours after his car had crossed the borders of the Golden State. He dressed hurriedly, packed his bags, paid his hotel bill, and obtained a map of the Los Angeles district, showing the route to the airport. Lanny was used to getting to places and it caused him no trouble.
He stored his car in a garage near the airport, and as he returned to the building he observed the arrival of a limousine, one of those elaborate custom-built jobs which mark the approach of a potentate, whether political, industrial, or theatrical. With the assistance of a uniformed footman there alighted a small lady with a large amount of blond hair elaborately curled. She wore much paint and powder, the costliest possible furs, and quite a display of jewels: in short, a tout ensemble of worldly grandeur. It occurred to Lanny that the lady’s face was familiar, but he forbore to stare and went on to the big shiny silver-topped plane.
The lady followed, with the footman carrying her bags, and Lanny perceived that he was to have the honor of traveling with this vision of loveliness. He realized who it must be: the actress whom the lord of San Simeon had installed in his palace something more than two decades ago, and of whom he was accustomed to say that he had spent six million dollars to make her a star. He had set up a producing concern and featured her in several pictures per year, and with the appearance of each picture the Hearst newspapers scattered from Boston to Seattle and from Atlanta to Los Angeles would burst into paeans of praise. In the old days when Lanny had hobnobbed with newspapermen at international conferences, this procedure had been a theme for cynical jesting, and to a young Pink it had seemed a measure of his country’s social decay.
Lanny gave his name to the pilot of the plane, who had it on a list. The lady said: “I am Marion Davies,” and the guest replied: “I am indeed honored, Miss Davies; I am one of your ardent fans.” This was a measure of Lanny’s social decay, for his true opinion was that she couldn’t act and that her efforts were pathetic.
XI
The roar of the plane made conversation difficult, so Lanny surveyed the landscape of California from the point of view of an eagle. First, masses of rumbled mountains, some bare and rocky, others with vegetation dried brown at this season of the year; then valleys with farms and orchards, and gray threads that were roads; always, off to the left, the blue Pacific, with a line of white surf, and now and then a vessel large or small. Very few towns, and rivers mostly dry beds; a land of which vast tracts were kept for grazing by wealthy owners who didn’t want settlers and money so much as they wanted space and fresh air. Only a land-values tax could have reached them, and there could be no such tax because they owned the newspapers and controlled both political machines.
The trip took about an hour, which meant a couple of hundred miles. A great stretch of lonely land, and then, close to the sea, La Cuesta Encantada—the enchanted hill—and on it a group of elaborate buildings which might have been the summer palace of the prince of the Asturias. The plane came down to a private airport, and there was a car to take them to the houses, and a station wagon for their bags. “Are you familiar with California, Mr. Budd?” inquired the lady; her real name was Douras, and she had been born In Brooklyn, two facts to which you did not refer.
Lanny replied: “It is my first visit, and I am agape with wonder.” It was the proper attitude. “I have lived most of my life abroad,” he continued. He had this grande dame of the silver screen to himself for a few minutes, and knew that the success of his enterprise might depend upon the impression he made. “So I have got most of my knowledge of America from your pictures and others. Now, when I see these landscapes I think I am on location, and when I meet Miss Marion Davies face to face I think I am back in Little Old New York—or I am with Polly of the Circus, or Blondie of the Follies, or Peg O’ My Heart.”
“Dear me, you really must be one of my fans!” exclaimed the actress, who wasn’t acting much nowadays, because in her forties she could no longer play juvenile parts and nobody dared to suggest any other parts.
“It must be a wonderful thing to know that you have given so much pleasure to so many millions of people, Miss Davies. Unless my memory fails me I saw When Knighthood Was in Flower in a tiny village called Stubendorf in Upper Silesia, and I saw Miss Glory in a wretched old shed called a theater in Southern Spain. I have never forgotten how the audience wept.” The treacherous one made these speeches with tender feeling, and knew from the way they were received that he had made a friend at court. He had known what he was coming to California for, and he had not failed to stop in a library and look up in Who’s Who the name of William Randolph Hearst, and that of his leading lady friend, with the list of her “starring vehicles.”
7
A Barren Scepter
I
The son of Budd-Erling had traveled three thousand miles, and here was his destination, the fabulous San Simeon, called “The Ranch.” It was the ranch to end all ranchos, covering four hundred and twenty square miles, which meant that from the mansion you could ride some fifteen mile
s in any direction, except out to sea, and never leave the estate. You could ride a horse, as “Willie” had done all through his boyhood; or if your taste ran to the eccentric, you could ride a zebra, or a llama, or a giraffe, a bison or yak or elephant or kangaroo or emu or cassowary. There were herds of all these creatures on the place, and numbers of central California cowboys to take care of them, and if a guest expressed a desire to ride one, the cowboys would no doubt take it as a perfectly normal eccentricity of these Hollywood folk. There were also lions and tigers and pumas and leopards in cages, and if Lanny had announced that he was a tamer of wild beasts and wanted to practice on these, the host would no doubt have seen to arranging it.
But the P.A. was a tamer of a more dangerous kind of wild beast; those who killed not for food but for glory; who killed not merely men but nations and civilizations. He was driven to La Casa del Sol—all the elaborate guest houses had Spanish names, as did everything else on the ranch. He was escorted to an elegant suite with a bathroom whose walls and floor and sunken tub were all of marble. He took a glance into one of the ample closets, and discovered therein complete outfits of every sort—one side of the closet for men and the other for women—pajamas, dressing gowns, swimming costumes, tennis and golf and riding clothes, and evening clothes which were permissible though not required. Lanny didn’t stop to find out how they would fit him; the sun was shining and it was warm, so he put on his own palm beach suit and, following orders, made his way to La Casa Grande, which is Spanish for what on Southern plantations is “the big house.” It was an immense structure in the style of an old Spanish mission; underneath it, the visitor learned before long, were acres of storerooms packed with art treasures like those he had inspected in the Bronx.
Here came the master of these treasures, the creator of this Arabian Nights’ dream of magnificence. He had been tall and large in proportion, like most men of these wide-open spaces, but now his shoulders were bowed and there were signs of a paunch. He had a long face and an especially long nose; his enemies called it a horse face and had made it familiar in cartoons. His strangest feature was a pair of small eyes, watery blue, so pale that they seemed lifeless: no feeling in them at all, and very little in the face, or in the flabby, unresponsive hand. A man withdrawn, a man who never gave himself; now a man grown old, with pouches under his eyes, sagging cheeks, and wattles under his chin. Lanny thought: a man unhappy, not pleased with the people around him, not pleased with his memories, and with no hopes for this world or the next.
It was easy to imagine things about him. Was his reason for keeping so many people around him the fact that he could avoid observing the defects of any one? There were seldom fewer than fifty guests, Lanny had been told, and this week-end he estimated there were seventy-five; he had to meet them all—there was an efficient major-domo who took him the rounds. There were faces familiar from the screen, and others whose names told him that they were top executives, producers and directors of pictures. He guessed that they were the friends of Marion Davies rather than of Hearst, who had drifted into her world, the world of make-believe, after he had failed so desolately to make a success in the world of politics and public affairs. He had tried to help the people—or so he must have told himself—but they had refused to trust him. Here was a new world, easier to live in; one made to order, and in which wealth could have its way.
The important, the big-money people of “the industry”—so it called itself—came here and made the place a sort of country club without dues. There was everything you could think of in the way of convenience; a Midas expended fifteen million dollars a year to maintain it, and granted the use of it to his courtiers and favorites. There was a bar, never closed, and you could have anything you asked for, provided you drank it in the public rooms. There was an immense medieval hall where you could play pool or billiards or pingpong, in between thousand-year-old choir stalls—incongruous, but no more so than other features of this fantastic estate. You could hunt or fish, or play tennis in courts with gold-quartz walls; you could swim in a pool of fresh cold water, or in another of salt water pumped up from the ocean and warmed.
II
After the cocktail hour, the lord of the manor took the arm of his star of the first magnitude and led a sort of grand-opera march into the dining-hall, which was in the style of a medium-sized cathedral. Everything was supposed to be different from what it was, and this apparently was a monks’ refectory; there was no cloth on the long table, which was of bare heavy wood, many centuries old. Priceless old china and glassware suggested a museum, printed menus suggested a hotel dining-room, while paper napkins suggested the lunch counter of a “five and ten.” The center of the table was marked by a long line of condiments and preserves, all in their original containers; all homemade, and the host was very proud of them. Like nothing else the much-traveled Lanny had seen on this earth was the entourage of Miss Marion Davies during the repast. Behind her chair stood a liveried manservant holding an embroidered silk tray with her toilet articles, and at a sign he would step forward and she would make use of them. The chair beside her was occupied by an elderly dog whose name was Gandhi—even though he was not a vegetarian; as each course of the elaborate meal was served, a special attendant brought Gandhi a silver tray with slices of choice meats, which were eaten with due propriety.
After the meal came the motion-picture showing, in a projection room built for that purpose. Attendance was obligatory upon all guests, and Lanny wondered about this; he had had no such experience since he had been a pupil at St. Thomas’s Academy in Connecticut and had been obliged to attend chapel every morning. Was it the host’s purpose to dignify the motion-picture art by setting it on the level of a form of worship? Was it a means of doing honor to the gracious lady who deigned to occupy the “Celestial Suite” in his palace? (Mrs. William Randolph Hearst lived in a mansion in New York.) Could it possibly have happened that in times past some guest had had the atrocious taste to wish to read his evening paper while a picture of Miss Davies was being run? The lord of this manor was a person of whims and furious temper; if an employe displeased him he would kick him out without ceremony and never see him again. Lanny had never forgotten a story told to him by one of the Hearst correspondents abroad: the man had been called to a conference in the master’s New York home, and they had talked until long after midnight; the host, being hungry, had taken his guest to the icebox; finding it locked, he had not let himself be balked, but had taken a red-painted fire axe from the wall and chopped his way through the door.
The “feature” for this Saturday night was one of those comedies which had come to be known as “screwball.” It had not yet been released, for of course this master of infinite publicity had the right to priority, and would never risk showing his guests anything shopworn. The picture had been made for a public which found life dull and depressing, and which paid its money for one purpose, to get as far away from reality as possible. The heroine of the story was the daughter of a millionaire who lived in a house with the customary drawing-room resembling a railroad station, and the hero was a handsome male doll supposed to be a newspaper reporter, that being an occupation which made it plausible for him to encounter a millionaire’s daughter. The young lady, wearing a different expensive costume in every scene, tried to run away from a traffic cop and landed in jail under an alias; the reporter tried to get her out, and there resulted a series of absurd adventures, most of which all motion-picture people had seen and helped to produce in many previous films.
In short, it was a stereotype, as much so as the faces and gestures of the leading man and lady. The reporter was supposed to be poor, but when you visited his mother’s home you discovered that it had a kitchen half as big as a railroad station, and that the mother and sisters wore the smartest clothes and had their hair waved and not a single strand out of place—otherwise the scene would have been reshot. Lanny watched the episodes, some of which depended upon what Broadway called wisecracks, and others upon slapstic
k, people falling on their behinds or into a fishpond; the scenes whirled by at breathless pace, as if the producers were driven by fear that if they paused for a moment the public might have time to realize what vapidity was being fed to them.
Lanny couldn’t make his escape; he had to stick it out. But there were no chains on his mind; he thought about these men and women, all persons of importance, of some kind of responsibility. What were their thoughts while they watched this entertainment? In their own word, it was “tripe,” and to the last person they must have been aware of the fact. Somebody here had produced it for the purpose of making money; and the others would be thinking: How much will it gross? They would speculate: Is there anything I can learn from it, any ideas I can take over, any actors, any writers I might hire?
Lanny knew the formula by which they excused themselves: it was “what the public wants.” The public, in the view of movie magnates, had no heart, no conscience, no brains; the public didn’t want to learn anything, it didn’t want to think, it didn’t want to improve itself, or to see its children better than itself. It just wanted to be amused, on its lowest level; it wanted to see life made ridiculous by grotesque mishaps; it wanted to revel in wealth, regardless of how it was gained or how wasted; above all it wanted to watch adolescents pairing off, kissing and getting ready to get married—boy meets girl! The assumption was that they would live happy ever after, though never was it shown how that miracle would be achieved, and though the divorce rate in America was continually increasing.