The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 28

Caroline and Emma simultaneously knew ecstasy. This was what being "understood" meant. "Tim and I quarrelled for days over that scene. To die with eyes open or shut. So we did it both ways. My way won, I'm happy to say. How vain," Caroline remembered in time to laugh, "one becomes."

"Hardly vanity. It's a business. The things you do well you should be grateful for. Looks, too. I was an actor for years before I started directing. You must build on what's there. ..." Happily, they talked shop.

After dinner, Caroline and Taylor sat in Mrs. Smythe's Tudor drawing room, and she confided to him her difficulties with Mary Queen of Scots. He knew, he said, an excellent writer. He himself would love to direct her in so distinguished a film-if, of course, Tim was not interested. She said, quite accurately, that Tim had never been much interested in historical studies of a romantic nature. Taylor's handsome graying head nodded thoughtfully over the pre-Prohibition brandy that the butler had brought him. "We could make it at Doug's studio. Doug and Mary's studio." He smiled; the eyes were boyish, a quality Caroline did not highly esteem in men but in Taylor's case it was understandable as he had made a number of highly successful movies about such bucolic American figures as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and other lads from the nation's not so distant Arcadian past. "We could release through United Artists," he said, staring at her mouth.

Caroline felt herself flus.h.i.+ng. "I have," she whispered, erotically, she hoped, "a four-picture contract through Traxler Productions with Lasky, and any loan-out arrangement of Emma Traxler must be agreed to by Mr. Zukor." Honeyed words, she knew.

"Tom Ince's a.s.sociated Producers Incorporated could, through Mr. Zukor, arrange a loan-out against a fifth Lasky picture and then, with me, we could set up a separate unit at Pickford-Fairbanks with distribution through United Artists at fifteen percent less than Mr. Zukor charges for a Paramount release." Was ever woman in such manner wooed? thought Caroline, besotted. If only Elinor Glyn could hear the real language of courts.h.i.+p, Hollywood-style.

Mabel Normand jittered over to them, toes turned inward, hands outward, her trademark. "Deal me a card? I'm strung out. Hi, Miss Traxler." Mabel spoke rapidly in a manner that Caroline was quite used to. Cocaine-users were edgy and in constant need of the sudden rush of energy to the brain which-Caroline had experimented-lasted no more than a quarter of an hour. Morphine was more benign and dreamy, and preferred by Was.h.i.+ngton's ladies while opium was the stuff of dreams in Paris. Caroline could easily have got used to opium; her half-brother Andre was a two-pipes-a-day man. But at this hazardous stage of her life she preferred her senses unclouded.

She noticed that Taylor was displeased by Mabel Normand's request. "No cards for you, my darling." He opened his cigarette case, and she removed a gold-tipped black cigarette. Was that how it was done? Caroline wondered. Mabel frowned, and hurried away. Caroline was aware that Taylor was watching her intently.

"Yes," said Caroline. "I understand."

"You don't understand how tough it is to get her off the stuff. Mabel!" he called after the star, who was now at the entrance hall.

"What?" She turned at the door.

"... Be good." She was gone. " 'Mabel, be good' is a private joke, and not much of one, I suppose." He looked suddenly attractively haggard. In the popular movies that Mabel had made with Chaplin as her co-director, her name had often been in the t.i.tle: Mabel's Busy Day, Mabel's Married Life, Mabel's New Job. Now Mabel's Cocaine Habit was becoming a problem.

"There are cures, aren't there?"

"For some people. Not for others. Like drink."

"I must get to bed at the usual early hour." Caroline was on her feet. Most elegantly, Taylor kissed her hand.

"No!" a voice tolled. "For the full romantic effect, you must kiss the palm of her hand." Elinor Glyn loomed over them.

"Perhaps, Miss Glyn, the full romantic effect is inappropriate." Caroline glittered from the sheer force of Emma's habit.

"It is always appropriate in the best society."

"Oh, what worlds you have seen, Miss Glyn, beyond my wildest daydreams."

"I'll ring you," said William Desmond Taylor.

Caroline was mildly disturbed that Tim was not in the least jealous. They sat in her sitting room with its view of Griffith's Babylon by moonlight. "I wouldn't," said Tim, "let Miss Glyn near Mary Queen of Scots."

"Of course not." Caroline looked at the three photo-play scripts that she had already acquired on the subject. The worst, predictably, had been Mrs. Hulbert's, but then Mary had only used the script as an excuse for long conversations with Caroline about herself, with the odd request for a small loan. The collapse of President Wilson had disturbed her far less than one of her son's recent financial misadventures. It had been with relief that Emma Traxler had, gently, cast her off. But not before Caroline had acquired sufficient material for a movie about a woman of enormous charm and perfect self-absorption who throws away every possibility in life because she has never noticed that anyone else exists.

Caroline turned on the gas-fire. The night was damp and cold. "I'm getting arthritic," she heard herself say. "I must go to your Bimini Baths. Where are they again?"

"Third and Vermont." Tim wore only underwear; the thin body looked discouragingly boyish. Taylor was as elegantly thin but hardly boyish. "It's built over an artesian spring. You know, he dopes."

"Who what?" Caroline pretended not to understand, as she poured tea from a Thermos bottle prepared by Heloise, who had taken to Hollywood's hours like the proverbial chicken.

"Bill Taylor. Mabel Normand says he was the one who got her on cocaine."

"Surely she was born with a ... sniffer, or whatever they call it, in her nose, like a silver spoon."

"Are you thinking about him for Mary?"

"Yes. After all, he's had so much success in period. Like Huckleberry Finn," she added for her own amus.e.m.e.nt. "We could do Mary Queen of Scots on the Mississippi on a raft."

"I've got a rough cut of the Wilson footage."

"I must talk to Blaise." Mention of Wilson reminded her of neglected duties, of her displaced if not lost self, Caroline Sanford. Of the Was.h.i.+ngton Tribune. Of the coming election.

"Are you interested?" Tim was drinking quite a lot of whisky, she noticed.

"No. Not really. The paper is well run without me. But we must take some sort of position. Blaise is bound to be far too Republican. I'll be-"

"I meant in the Wilson footage."

"Oh, that." She sounded more vague than she intended.

"You're not. I'm off to bed."

"No." Emma Traxler made a weary reappearance on the scene.

"I'm sorry. I've had a hard day. The Griffith studios aren't available after all."

Tim stopped at the connecting door to his suite. "Work's always hard if you're not used to it."

"What an unusual observation to make to me," said Caroline Sanford, the first self-made woman newspaper publisher in the world. "I am supposed to be an inspiration to every suffragette in the land."

"Your face ...?"

"My newspaper."

"Good night." He was gone. Habit, thought Caroline, counted for more than love. Could she do without the habit of Tim? As she stared at the dark row of prancing elephants in the gray moonlight, the musical horn of a foreign-made car sounded below her in Sunset Boulevard, like a motif in a romantic opera-bouffe. But what was Emma Traxler but a figure from Offenbach? Now in danger of turning into one from Strauss, the Marschallin. She had better turn back into her true self, if there was such a thing left. As if to remind herself of that true self, she picked up the latest stack of pages from her daughter, an excited testimonial to Caroline's perfect failure as a mother.

Apparently, Tim's new picture would be picketed by anti-Communists, while Emma Traxler was on a list of suspect Americans. Emma Sanford wrote page after page about the wonders of living in a free country while exulting, simultaneously, in all the publications that her group had managed to shut down as well as teachers fired, politicians defeated, labor organizers imprisoned. The child was mad. Was the country, too?

Caroline had no real sense of the new United States or, indeed, of the old. She had known the most rarefied of American society, the Hearts of Henry Adams; and she had delighted in the District of Columbia and, most lately, in the exciting unreality-even surreality-of Hollywood; but what, finally, did she know of the actual Americans, starting with her daughter and son-in-law? Were there many others like them out there, with lurid dreams of absolute conformity to some rustic ideal? True, the sometime peasant nation had finally encountered civilized old Europe at last, and Europe had offered it war and revolution and Bolshevism. No wonder the real and would-be peasants were distressed. But what was the true origin of their mindless panic? What were Americans afraid of? She wished Henry Adams were alive to explain it all. But then in lieu of his comforting presence and wisdom, she tore up her daughter's letter, and threw the pieces into a wastebasket. She felt nothing at all about her own child. But then Mlle. Souvestre had always said that when a woman's daughter is no longer a child but fully grown and married, the two women, even though one be demi-creatrix of the other, are wise to part.

Caroline finished her tea and went into the bedroom so seldom visited now by Tim. Plainly the time had come to renew herself; this time with William Desmond Taylor. After all, the clock never ceased to tick even when she was not aware of it. Somehow or other, most of the day was now quite gone.

NINE.

1.

JESS ENJOYED THE BRIGHT APRIL SUN RATHER MORE than he did the New York Times editorial that he was reading. "Harding is eliminated. Even if his name is presented to the convention ..." Jess felt the saliva beginning to drool down his chin; he wiped it off with the Times and hoped he hadn't smudged his face. At the far end of the front porch, the candidate himself was seated, talking to the folks who wandered by. All in all, the last two primaries had been discouraging. Harding had carried Ohio as a native son, but even so, General Wood with all of his unfair millions of dollars had acquired-bought was more like it-nine of the state's forty-eight delegates, and, unkindest blow of all, Daugherty himself had failed to be elected a delegate.

A week later, at Daugherty's insistence, Harding had entered the Indiana primary. Wood, Johnson and Lowden had all run ahead of W.G., who managed to win only two of fifty-six counties. Jess knew the reason. There was, simply, no money for Harding. The rich bankers and Roosevelt men were financing Wood, and Mrs. Lowden was financing Governor Lowden. Jess and his co-chairman Daugherty had raised barely a hundred thousand dollars against all those millions, and that was why the New York Times could now write magisterially, "... everyone will know that he is an impossible candidate." Although W.G. had been deeply distressed by Indiana and spoke, in public, of his own impossibility as a candidate, in private, he was surprisingly serene. "This will all come my way, barring divine intervention," he had told Daugherty and Jess, while the d.u.c.h.ess, reinforced by more astrological bulletins from Madame Marcia, agreed.

Harding's strategy was to be himself. He had particularly ingratiated himself with Lowden by promising not to go after any of his delegates, and the grateful Lowden had reciprocated. Harding had done some simple adding and subtracting and come to the conclusion that if no candidate could be nominated on the first ballot, everyone's number two would win on the hundredth, or however many ballots were needed. So he would see to it that he was everyone's second favorite. Daugherty had accepted the strategy, and the two men had quietly crisscrossed the country, ingratiating themselves to everyone and disturbing no one.

"Jess." Jess put down the Times and there, to his horror, was Carrie Phillips. She was elegantly got up, he noted, with the eye of a fellow dry-goods dealer and arbiter of fas.h.i.+on.

"Carrie Phillips," Jess whispered so that W.G., whose back was to them at the far end of the porch, would not hear or, G.o.d forbid, the d.u.c.h.ess, who was inside busy telephoning, her princ.i.p.al activity these days.

"I thought you weren't coming round here now." Jess's rocking chair was at the porch's edge, and he was able to lean over so that their heads were practically touching.

"Oh? I was just out for a stroll, that's all. It's a free country."

Jess knew that a "final" exchange of letters had pa.s.sed between Carrie and W.G. For one thing, Jim now knew everything. For another, though the press had as yet shown no special interest in Harding's campaign, there was always the danger that an ambitious reporter might do some snooping before the convention and what with everyone in Marion knowing everyone else's business, W.G.'s image of a good family man might easily be altered to ... to the Satyr of the Chautauqua, thought Jess wildly.

"I just wanted to sneak by and say h.e.l.lo. That's all. See? I'm on tiptoe." So, on tiptoe, Carrie approached W.G., who was now alone in his rocker at the other end of the porch, reading not the Times editorial but the sports page. When he saw Carrie, he beamed. But she put her finger to her lips and whispered something that caused him to lean forward, head lowered, hand clutching the porch rail. Now their heads were together; and Jess felt ill. What would Daugherty say? What would the d.u.c.h.ess do?

The d.u.c.h.ess said nothing at all, which was most ominous. Instead, she appeared in the doorway to the house and, for a long moment, glared at the adulterous couple. W.G., as if he had eyes in the back of his head, which indeed he may well have had when it came to his wife, sat back in his chair but did not turn around or otherwise acknowledge the appearance of the d.u.c.h.ess on the scene.

Carrie continued to talk in a low voice to W.G., ignoring the d.u.c.h.ess, as well as the feather-duster that suddenly came hurtling her way. Then the d.u.c.h.ess, now very red in the face, stepped back inside to collect a metal waste-basket, which she aimed with astonis.h.i.+ng accuracy at Carrie, who leapt quickly to one side, while continuing her conversation with W.G., who was now looking back over his shoulder at the d.u.c.h.ess.

As Florence Kling Harding went back inside for more ammunition, Jess looked around to see who was watching this spectacle: several old citizens of Marion, used to such displays, and an unfamiliar well-dressed man, who stared in horror at this domestic scene. Jess prayed that he was not a newspaperman.

The d.u.c.h.ess returned, holding in her arms a four-legged piano stool whose swivel-seat was of considerable weight. With the strength, as it were, of ten, the d.u.c.h.ess hurled the homely piece of household furniture at Carrie. En route, the stool narrowly missed the handsome head of Ohio's famous and, literally, favorite son, and only by a ballet leap to the right did the golden adulteress avoid concussion. Overcome by force majeure, Carrie graciously blew a kiss at Harding, and sauntered down Mount Vernon Avenue, enjoying the spring suns.h.i.+ne. The triumphant d.u.c.h.ess withdrew. She had said not one word; nor had she any reason to when her actions were so eloquent.

With some dignity, Harding had got to his feet, and said, to his wife's back: "Florence, this is not becoming, not seemly at all."

Later that day Daugherty arrived in Marion, and Jess reported everything, as they sat in the bar of the newly restored Old Heidelberg, where whisky in teacups was available to regular customers in contravention of the Eighteenth Amendment that prevented the American citizen, whose fundamental charter a.s.sured him life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, from drinking alcohol. Jess, who was not a const.i.tutional scholar, did wonder, from time to time, how the U.S. could be, as everyone knew, the freest country on earth when there was a government busy prohibiting whatever it thought people shouldn't have. In Europe, it was said, the decadent old races were laughing at their recent saviors. Fortunately, every town had its Old Heidelberg, and Jess sipped at Scotch whisky from Canada, while Daugherty said, "We've got to get her-and him-out of town until after the convention. No!" The brown eye blinked fiercely while the blue eye was tranquil. "Until after the election."

"Him? W.G.?"

"No. No. Jim Phillips. He knows everything, and it beats me why Carrie keeps coming around like this unless ..."

"They want to be paid off?"

Daugherty nodded. "Of course this'd come at a time when we've spent just about everything."

"What about Ned McLean?"

But Daugherty's active mind had moved on to other subjects. "Jake Hamon's worth a million to us down in Oklahoma. But his price is a third of the Navy oil lands, and I don't see how we can promise that."

Jess had been immensely impressed by the large loud Oklahoma oil man with his showy mistress and extravagant ways. But Jess had seen no reason to trust him; neither did Daugherty. "W.G.'s counting on a deadlock." Daugherty was thoughtful. "If Wood and Lowden get stuck they'll stay stuck and there's no compromise except W.G."

"Johnson?"

"Never. He's a red rag to the conservatives. But W.G. figures that maybe a quarter, maybe more, of the delegates will remember him from four years ago when he made that great speech to the convention. Or even from eight years ago when he nominated Taft, and since he's stayed in touch with a lot of them, they'll ... I wish I was as sure of this as he is."

Jess was puzzled. "I thought you was the one supposed to be charging him up?"

"That's the way he wants it to look. He's going to be all maidenly and blushy and modest with a lot of 'I'm not worthy,' while I'm the keen, hard-driving manager who seems to be prodding him, like a bullock home at sundown. 'Course he's the ideal middle-of-the-road candidate, which he thinks is what the country wants, and if that's so ..."

"You think he'll make it?"

Daugherty shrugged. "How? All the money's with Wood and Lowden, and the Republican Party's the money party. Jess, you remember Nan Britton, don't you?"

Jess nodded. All Marion knew how, even as a very young girl, Dr. Britton's daughter Nan had developed a crush on the handsome editor of the Marion Star. She had never made any secret of the fact that she used to cut out pictures of W.G. from the newspapers for her sc.r.a.p-book; and she would even moon about the Mount Vernon house, to W.G.'s embarra.s.sment and the d.u.c.h.ess's rage. After Dr. Britton's death, Nan had moved to New York City; and Jess a.s.sumed that by now she was married and settled down.

"She's up in Chicago. She's got a job as a secretary, and she's living with her sister Elizabeth."

"Nice-looking girls, both of them. I suppose they're all married and ... and grown up," Jess added, vaguely. He felt the saliva begin to form in his mouth. He took out his handkerchief, ready to mop rather than spray, a habit that maddened Daugherty.

"Elizabeth is married." Daugherty withdrew a slip of paper from his pocket. "To a man called Willits. He plays the fiddle or something for the Chicago Opera Company. Nan's living with them. Here's their address."

"Why?"

Daugherty finished his tea and stared, moodily, at the travelling salesman across the smoky tavern. "W.G. has been carrying on with Nan for ... I don't know how long. I found out some time in 1917 when he got her a job as a secretary in New York and used to sneak up there to see her in these different hotels, where in one of them ..." Daugherty stopped. "Well, that's neither here nor there."

"Carrie and Nan?" Jess, unable to be active with his own beloved Roxy, was filled with envy. On the other hand, with the d.u.c.h.ess for a wife, a man deserved some solace elsewhere. "Is she making trouble?" Jess understood blackmail well enough.

"No. Not yet anyway. She's in love with him ..."

"Is he in love with her?"

"What a question!" Daugherty looked at Jess with such disgust that, reflexively, Jess dried his lower lip just to make certain that he himself was not disgusting. "How do I know? What do I care? We're politicians, for G.o.d's sake. We love the people, the ones who vote, anyway. All I know is W.G.'s still sweet on her. He writes her letters."

"Letters." An alarm bell went off in Jess's head.

"Yes. Letters."

"Like President Wilson did to Mrs. Peck?"

"These are a bit homier, Jess." Daugherty was sardonic. "W.G. swears there's nothing compromising, but h.e.l.l, any letter to a girl half your age, telling about hotel rooms and times and places, is going to look real bad."

"You want me to buy the letters?"

Daugherty shook his head. "No. She won't sell them. I've tried. I think she thinks someday the d.u.c.h.ess will die or disappear and she'll marry W.G. But that's not the problem." Daugherty gave Jess an envelope which, from its size and heft, contained currency. "I want you to go to Chicago, and give her this money."

"So then she is blackmailing him."

"No. Child support. For their daughter, born last October."

Jess stared at Daugherty, as though he'd just made a complicated joke that Jess was too dense to comprehend. Should he ask for the punch line again? "Does ... does W.G. admit that it's his?"

Daugherty nodded. "He helps out all he can."

"But the convention's in Chicago." Jess was getting panicky.