Lanny had expected this invitation and forewarned his wife. One of his jobs was to watch these people, so he would play his role of near-Fascist, and the thing for Laurel to do was to be a little mouse wife, with no ideas on the war or politics, just listening respectfully to the famous ones. Everybody in this town was playing a role, on and off the screen, and what Laurel as a novelist wanted was to store up material without giving any hint that she possessed a critical mind. They went back to the retired cattle princess and told her they had to be on their way; her chauffeur hitched up the trailer, and the P.A. drove it up into Benedict Canyon and deposited it safely out of sight and out of mind on the Armbruster estate. Then he drove his wife to the shops in Beverly Hills, for she couldn’t appear at “Genie’s” parties in the clothes that had been all right in the company of eighteen water spaniels.
XII
The screen people you met at the Armbrusters were all very rich; the poorest of them earned more than the President of the United States, and they all knew what the others were earning and talked about it frankly—and often. People were graded in importance according to their salaries, and if you dropped from the five-thousand-a-week class to the two-thousand-a-week class you were relegated to a different social group. There were many who would deny that this was true, but meantime it would be happening automatically, for if you had only two thousand a week you couldn’t live like those in the higher class; your liquor wouldn’t be so choice or your swimming pool so roomy. There were some who talked about saving their money and retiring to do something worthwhile, but few indeed were able to achieve this, for the pressure to spend money like your friends and associates was irresistible. Here and there were little groups that got off by themselves and talked about “art,” but as a rule that would be considered pretentious, and even a bit unkind, a criticism of your profession and your friends.
This Hollywood world had grown up in the course of some forty or fifty years, and money was what had made it and now maintained it. Money had brought talent of every sort from all over the world; money love and money glamour had put its stamp on them and on every product they turned out. In the last great panic “the industry” had been on the rocks and Wall Street had stepped in and bought control; now it exercised its silent but firm say-so, as everywhere else in American big business. Pictures were produced to make money and no nonsense about it, and if you didn’t like that you could move out to the Mohave Desert and raise chickens, or up into the bare hills and walk behind a flock of sheep.
The couple from the east found the movie stars for the most part kindly and likable people. There were some among them who had a social conscience in spite of their high salaries. They defended the New Deal, and this was considered a sign of a disordered mind, for why shouldn’t they be grateful to a country which paid them so extravagantly The mass of the “colony” were normal Americans who wanted two things: to get more money, and to be allowed to keep it and not have to pay it to the government in the form of income taxes. There were some who were rabid on this subject. They damned the bureaucracy which spent their money for them; and, above all, they damned “That Man,” who was the “master mind,” to use one of Hollywood’s own phrases.
It was these people whom one met at the Armbrusters’ cocktail parties and evening affairs. They had no idea that the Budds were or could be any different from themselves. Lanny discovered that now, with the country at war and the Soviet Union an indispensable ally, they no longer expressed the hope that somebody “would shoot ‘That Man.’” What they wanted was to get rid of him at the next election, less than a year away. They agreed that a fourth term would be absolutely fatal to American liberties; they rejoiced in every mistake that Roosevelt made, even when it was one which might be costly to the nation.
What these near-Fascists wanted most of all was to revise and remodel the war, and find some way to get the Germans on our side and the Russians off. They had given up Adi Schicklgruber as being a hopeless bungler; they wanted to get rid of him at the same time they got rid of the Squire of Krum Elbow, and they questioned Lanny, knowing that he had been in Germany and actually knew the Nazi leaders. He was able to please them by revealing that many of the Wehrmacht officers wanted to oust Hitler and take over the government. These were the natural-born leaders of Germany, and Hollywood actors who had enacted their roles on the screen thought that was an ideal solution. They urged the son of Budd-Erling to stay and join the society they had organized to combat the many Red agents who were trying to seduce Hollywood and turn it to the ends of Moscow.
XIII
After a few days Lanny sent a telegram to the lord of San Simeon, reminding him that he had asked Lanny to bring him information whenever he could, and added, “I am here at your disposal. My wife is with me.” It took no more than a couple of hours for a reply to arrive saying that the lord would be pleased to receive them at any time. They could be flown from the Burbank airport in his plane if they so desired. Lanny replied that they would motor up the next day.
To bring a tiny trailer to a place where sumptuous accommodations were prepared for a couple of hundred guests would have been rather absurd; so “Bienvenu” was locked up and left behind the Armbrusters’ garage, and Laurel took her best clothes in suitcases. The coast highway had been opened up all the way to the north, and through the San Simeon property in spite of the lord’s most strenuous opposition. The highway was costly, winding along the sides of cliffs; the scenery was of the finest, but you had to watch out with your driving or you’d find yourself in the Pacific Ocean.
Lanny warned his wife, “I have been asked to find out what this old man is doing and planning; so you have to be a Fascist for a while longer. Of course you call yourself a democrat, but you don’t work at it. You mustn’t say anything impolite about Hitler, or even about Mussolini; even though he’s been kicked out he’s still a great man, and he made the trains run on time.”
“I’ve been reading the Examiner,” said Laurel, “so I know his ideas.”
“No, that’s a mistake,” replied the husband. “What the old man says in the Examiner is what he wants the public to believe about him. He calls it Americanism, and it sounds fine, but what he actually believes is something out of the Middle Ages. It will be wiser for you to keep quiet and watch me draw him out.”
He told about the life of “Willie”—so his parents had called him, but now even his most intimate friends called him “Mr. Hearst.” He was the son of a gold-mining king who had bought himself a seat in the United States Senate and had sent his only son to Harvard. Willie had got himself expelled for indecent behavior, and from that experience he had conceived a bitter hatred of the so-called respectable world, and a determination to “show them.” His father had bought a derelict San Francisco newspaper, and Willie’s way of “showing” had been to fill it with crime, sex, and sensation. “Yellow journalism,” it was called, and by appealing to everything base in the nature of the masses Willie had collected their pennies by the billions.
He had come to New York and bought a small paper called the Journal, and had set out to conquer that most haughty and sophisticated part of the world. He had built up an empire, with newspapers in a score of cities, including the most proper Boston which had kicked him out. Then he had taken up the idea of “showing them” in politics; he had dreamed of being Mayor of New York City, Governor of New York State, President of the United States. To accomplish that he had become a “radical,” espousing the cause of the masses and calling himself their friend and champion. But he found that while the masses would read his papers, they wouldn’t trust him and didn’t vote for him.
So William Randolph Hearst had become an embittered man, turning against all the causes he had espoused in his younger days. He had built himself the palace of an emperor, and retired to sit on his heap of gold and use it to dominate the lives of other men. In his heart he despised these men because they took his money and wrote not what they believed, but what he commanded. “
All his life he has done that,” Lanny said. “He would come into the office of the New York American shortly before midnight and throw out everything the paper had prepared in reference to some politician; because that politician’s wife had just insulted Hearst’s lady friend, Hearst would order a cartoon portraying that politician in prison stripes. In politics, as in every other phase of life, he has been cynicism incarnate, and I think he has been the most demoralizing single force in American life.”
Laurel said, “What an introduction to a host!”
XIV
There were gates, and a porter’s lodge, and apparently a list of names which the porter consulted; then they drove on a winding road to the hill on which this economic emperor had erected a monument to his own glory. There was a vast main building and half a dozen villas, each with a fancy Spanish name. A majordomo received them, much as if it had been a smart restaurant; a servant brought in their bags and another took their car. The place looked and felt just like a de luxe hotel; you had a suite with a sunken bathtub, and you found a list of rules on the inside of the door, telling you among other things that if you wanted meals you must come on time. Exactly like the Berghof, except that in this place you were allowed to smoke, and there was a bar where you could drink all you wanted, but you were not allowed to take anything to your rooms.
San Simeon resembled Karinhall in that it was an art museum as well as a residence. There were cellars, occupying the entire space under the main building, packed with art works, most of which had never been uncrated. Hanging on the walls of the rooms were paintings enough to keep an art expert happy for weeks. The “Yellow Kid,” as Hearst’s enemies had called him during his early days, shared the blind passion of Unser Hermann for collecting for its own sake. Everything that anybody else wanted very much must belong to them, even though they had no use for it and hadn’t time even to look at it. In Hearst’s case it included everything from Egyptian scarabs to a twelfth-century monastery, which had been taken down stone by stone, boxed, labeled, and shipped to New York, but never put together again! San Simeon differed from Karinhall in that it was also a zoo, with a great number of wild animals from all parts of the world, in cages or fenced enclosures. It was also a gym, with provision for a variety of games: handball, tennis, and squash courts, indoor and out, and swimming pools of fresh and salt water both warm and cold.
The Budds had arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and after they had freshened up they went down to the main rooms. Several guests were there, chatting, and Lanny introduced his wife to Miss Marion Davies, retired motion picture star, who was made-up as if expecting to be called before the camera. Laurel had been duly posted—this was their host’s special friend and much depended upon her favor. In her company they strolled and looked at old masters, and Lanny poured out a fund of information surprising to people who had never realized that the history of art is a subject of study, just like the history of politics, or warfare, or other human activity.
In one corner of the great hall sat a large, tall, extremely wrinkled old man with gray hair and a long face which had been a boon to cartoonists for more than fifty years. He was diligently writing with a pencil on a pad, and it was one of the unwritten laws of this place that nobody ever disturbed him at such times. He was laying down the policies of the Hearst newspapers for the next day, and thus determining the thoughts of some ten or twenty million Americans for that period and longer. He didn’t bother to retire to his study, but just sat in any chair that happened to be handy and set down whatever occurred to him. It might be a headline, or a directive for the handling of some news item; it might be an editorial idea for one of his many writers to elaborate, or it might be a proclamation to be signed WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST.
When the writing on the pad was completed, a secretary would type it, if there was time, and then it would be “shot” from the telegraph office in this building. It would go to the nineteen Hearst newspapers in leading American cities, and in due course the air mail would bring copies of each of these papers, and “W.R.” would check carefully to be sure his instructions had been followed. If it hadn’t been done he would “shoot” a wire to the offending person, telling him in the plainest language what mistakes he had made; if that happened more than once or twice there would come a wire saying, “Your services are no longer required.”
Such was the life of an eighty-year-old journalist-emperor. This was what interested him, and if he ever talked or thought about anything else, it was just play, or politeness to some guest. His right to manage these papers in this precise way was what he meant by all the noble phrases he used: the free enterprise system, freedom of initiative, the American way, the Constitution, the Flag, and the Christian Religion. Above all, this was democracy, spelled with a small “d”; for now the Democratic party was a prisoner of the New Deal, and the Hearst newspapers, calling themselves “Independent,” gave their support to Hoover, Coolidge, and Harding.
XV
At the beginning of December President Roosevelt at last accomplished his desire to exercise his charms upon Marshal Stalin. Churchill had already been to Moscow, but Churchill’s charms were of a different sort. Stalin had a good memory and knew that Britain’s Tory leader had been calling for war on Bolshevism from the moment it had lifted its head in 1917. But the Squire of Krum Elbow was the author of the New Deal, the friend of the common man, and the enemy of the economic royalists; more than that, he was the inventor of lendlease and was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of supplies to the Soviet Union every month. Money talks, and F.D.R. was talking world order, peace, and prosperity in a voice loud enough for even the people of the Soviet Union to hear.
Stalin had been too busy to come to Allied lands, and they had compromised upon Teheran, the capital of what had once been Persia and now was Iran. There, in the Russian Embassy, the three top leaders had a four-day conference, and now as it came to an end a formal statement was issued. That was what Mr. Hearst had been so busy with; and when he had finished he strolled over and welcomed his new guests, and after chatting for a few minutes took Lanny off to his study and spent the rest of the afternoon with him. On Lanny’s earlier visit to San Simeon he had received the handsome offer of fifty thousand dollars a year to become one of this imperial person’s political scouts, and to report to him privately what he could learn about the insides of world affairs. Now the lord of San Simeon had a chance to get some of it free of charge, and he wasn’t failing to take the chance.
He talked about the news which had come over his private wire, and to which some of his guests were now listening over the radio. The statement issued from Teheran brought no satisfaction whatever to the owning and directing head of a great newspaper chain. It consisted of the vaguest and most empty generalizations. Complete unanimity had been reached on military plans, unity was to be maintained in the making of peace, and all freedom-loving nations would be invited to lend their aid in meeting the world’s future problems. “Bunk!” exclaimed William Randolph Hearst. “Pap for infants and imbeciles! How much of Poland are they going to leave to Russia, and how much of Germany are they going to give to Poland to make up for it? And what are they going to do with Austria, and all the Balkans? Are they going to let Russia bolshevize them, and if not, how are they going to prevent it?”
Lanny didn’t have the answers to any of those questions and could only say that the situation looked dark indeed to him. There could be no question that the Russians were on their way to Berlin and would get there in a year or two, especially if the Allies attempted a Channel crossing next spring. Lanny could say that the Allied armies invading Italy were not being reinforced, and were even losing some of their bombing units and landing craft; and this was a sure indication of a projected landing in France. The military men in Berlin, the really competent ones, were becoming hopeless as to their chances.
Naturally a large-scale vendor of news pricked up his ears. How did Mr. Budd know these things? When Lanny said that
he had recently been in both Berlin and Rome, he was free to talk as long as he pleased and be sure of close attention. How in the world did he manage such a trip? Lanny replied that it was his father’s influence; beyond that, unfortunately, he was not free to say. But he talked about Ciano and Badoglio and Count Volpi, and then about Hitler and Göring and their entourages, both in Berlin and in Berchtesgaden and Karinhall; he made it plain that this was no fairytale he was making up. He told how Hitler had promised a competence to Kurt Meissner to compose an opera about the collapse of National Socialism, which showed what was going on in a Führer’s secret soul.
Adi, unrelenting opponent of the Reds, had sent Lanny Budd a special message to his American friend and colleague. What Herr Hitler wanted was to get rid of Herr Rosenfeld as quickly as possible and by any means possible. The Hearst newspapers were doing everything in their power to accomplish this by the constitutional process; but that wouldn’t be soon enough—the election was eleven months off, and there would be two months more before a new President could be inaugurated. By that time the Russian barbarians might have nearly all of Eastern Germany—and would they ever get out until they had established a Bolshevik regime over all the territory they held? Hitler wanted the job on Roosevelt done by some quicker process and had commissioned the son of Budd-Erling to consult with all his friends in America and try to arrange the matter.
Lanny said he was doing his best; there had been a lot of talk about the idea, and now, apparently, some action was going to be taken. He dangled this bait before the publisher’s nose, but the cautious old fellow behaved like a fat trout that doesn’t rise to a fly. All he said was that the situation was desperate, and he personally could see no basis for hope. He went on to ply the high-class messenger with questions about conditions in the Axis lands, and at the conclusion of the talk he tried once more to get the messenger into his service. If fifty thousand dollars a year wasn’t enough, let Mr. Budd name a price.