The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 37

"Nan," Jess was careful not to sound too alarmed, "Cosmopolitan is owned by Mr. Hearst, whose newspapers would do anything to find out about you and the President."

"Don't be silly, Jess. How could they ever find out? We aren't going to tell them. So who can? Anyway, it looks awfully easy, acting, if you have these emotions for the camera to show, like a radiogram, in a way. Well, I have suppressed emotions all right." Softly, Nan began to cry. Jess noted that she was careful not to make her eyes red or smear her make-up.

"There. There." Jess was avuncular. Then, when she had paused in the course of her audition, he asked, "Why did that new agent come to me just now?"

"Because Jim had to go home at the last minute. So he got his friend to bring me in here. I pretended I was here to see you about Ohio business. Jim's leaving the Secret Service, you know."

"I know." It was Jess who had got Sloan a job as Was.h.i.+ngton manager of Samuel Ungerleider. They were all family, Jess had reported to Daugherty, who had grunted. Certainly, it would never do to have Jim Sloan at large in the world with all that he knew about the President's private life.

"Anyway, from now on I'm to write in care of Arthur Brooks, the colored valet, so Jim tells me, which I don't in the least mind. Anyway," now recovered and eyes s.h.i.+ning, "will you go tell him I'm here?"

As Jess got to his feet, Nan crossed to the President's desk, where she picked up a miniature of W.G.'s mother. "He was so devoted to her, everyone says. Doesn't she look precious here? Like Elizabeth Ann, her granddaughter."

Jess returned to the upstairs sitting room. Others had joined the President. General Sawyer, small and shrewd, was laying down the law to the d.u.c.h.ess, who listened to him with perfect docility, for he alone understood her last kidney and its vagaries. Charlie Forbes was delighting the President and Daugherty with excited stories while the Secretary of the Interior sat beside the fire, drinking tea with a disgusted expression. After much debate, the President had decided that in the private apartments-specifically the bedrooms of the White House-the law prohibiting alcohol could be broken but in those parts of the White House that plainly belonged to the nation, the law must be upheld. It was not much of a compromise, but then Prohibition was not much of a law. Nevertheless, W.G. took very seriously the dignity of his place and he would not do anything unseemly if he could help it. Now, of course, he could not help it. Presently, he would be joining Nan in the anteroom closet.

Jess simply stared at the President until W.G. became aware of him. Easily, smilingly, W.G. left the group that was laughing with Charlie Forbes, and came toward Jess, who whispered, "She's in your office."

Harding's smile did not fade; but the eyes were suddenly alert. He glanced at the d.u.c.h.ess and General Sawyer; neither was aware of anything on earth save her kidney. Then the President and Laddie Boy left the room. Only Daugherty had noticed. The blue eye stared at Jess, who nodded. The brown eye blinked, as Daugherty nodded, meaning, no.

Jess sat down beside the Secretary of the Interior, who said, "Jess, you want to know what I know? Well, what I know is I can't wait to get the h.e.l.l out of here, and go home to New Mexico." Fall coughed at length into a bandanna-like handkerchief. "Bronchitis." He held up a gnarled hand. "Arthritis. Now pleurisy, they say."

"Ask Doc Sawyer."

"I'd rather go to a veterinarian." Fall eyed the small doctor with disfavor. "I've also got a hole in my lung from this stag which don't help matters. I keep asking the President to let me go but he says it wouldn't be seemly so soon into his Administration. Now I've been stuck with the naval oil reserves because Denby doesn't want to be bothered with them, which means every crook in the country is trying to get his hands on all that government oil." Fall was full of complaints, and Jess was eager to hear each and every one because he had-as who had not?-friends who were keenly interested in acquiring those oil lands held by the government. The Navy believed implicitly that since a war with j.a.pan was bound to come sooner or later, American battles.h.i.+ps must have instant access to their own fuel supply. So oil-reserve lands in California and Wyoming had been set aside by President Wilson. Now peace had broken out; and the fleets of the world, instead of growing, were, thanks to Harding, shrinking, and the dim Secretary of the Navy, Denby, had turned the whole business over to the Department of the Interior, a mixed blessing to hear Fall tell it. "Now I've had all the bother since May. Denby's out of it. I'm in it. Favors. Special favors," Fall muttered into his huge moustaches. He shook his head bleakly.

"Well, the government can turn a nice profit auctioning off those reserves. That's something." Jess's pulse began to beat faster; this time not diabetes but money had triggered his nervous system.

"If I can." Fall was cryptic. "We had open bidding last summer for Elk Hills, California. Wasn't much in it for us. But a lot of oil ... lot of profit for the winner."

"Edward Doheny."

Fall glanced at Jess with mild surprise that anyone should have bothered to follow so insignificant a matter. "That's the one." He was noncommittal. "The big problem isn't oil. It's those G.o.dd.a.m.ned conservationists, like young Roosevelt." Fall denounced the Under-Secretary of the Navy, who was, like his cousin Franklin and his father Theodore, occupying the family post at the Navy Department.

Jess was surprised at Fall's vehemence, considering the fact that Fall was a Roosevelt Republican, an original Rough Rider, a true progressive, whatever that was.

Then dinner was announced, an informal affair for W.G.'s particular friends in the Administration. Since Jess was not asked as often to these meals as he would have liked, he did not in the least mind being put next to the general counsel of the Veterans Bureau, Charles F. Cramer, a colorless Californian whose main distinction was that he had bought the Hardings' house in Wyoming Avenue. He also thought the world of his boss, Charlie Forbes, a man equally mistrusted by Daugherty and Doc Sawyer, to Jess's surprise, since Daugherty was never censorious and the Doc's only interest in Forbes would have been on the medical side, involving all those hospitals which were supposed to be not only first-rate but highly profitable. Jess suspected, on Daugherty's side, a degree of jealousy. Charlie always made W.G. laugh. Daugherty usually made him frown.

At the moment W.G., somewhat too red in the face, was laughing at one of Charlie's jokes. Presumably, the tryst with Nan had been satisfactory, if brief.

Cramer turned to Jess. "Where are you living now?" Everyone seemed to know that Ned McLean's H Street house had been abandoned the previous month when Daugherty and Lucie and Jess had all three moved into Wardman Park.

"Well, I'm camping out with General Daugherty." Jess took pleasure in his friend's t.i.tle.

"Thought you were at K Street now." Cramer was not as dim as he appeared. "In the green house."

Jess shook his head. "That's my old friend Howard Mannington. He's set up shop there, doing business, he says. I see him from time to time." That was enough information, Jess decided. The operation at 1625 K Street was a smooth affair. Jess and two old friends were agents for the ever-thirsty General Drug Company. They also transacted all sorts of business with desperate men who wanted immunity from prosecution or, simply, information from the files of the Justice Department, to which Jess, in his sixth-floor office, had the key. But no matter how much business was done in the little green house on K Street or from Jess's office at the Justice Department, Daugherty, by design, was kept largely uninformed while the President never suspected anything amiss other than a somewhat blatant trafficking with bootleggers on poker nights. "My G.o.d, how the money rolls in!" Jess hummed.

3.

BLAISE LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF Laurel House and, like pre-Edenic G.o.d, was pleased at his creation. The house itself was comfortable but not too grand for the Virginia countryside. The mock-Georgian style tended to symmetry, as did Blaise, who had, instinctively, like G.o.d when he made Adam, done things in twos-one marble obelisk on the left of the lawn balanced exactly the one on the right. The pool house, now visible through the winter trees, was equally balanced: a pavilion to the left was hers, one to the right was his. Only the original trees were allowed to escape Blaise's binary pa.s.sion. They loomed like black slashes and scratches drawn against the dirty gray winter sky.

Beyond the trees, far below the level of lawn and house, the swift Potomac River broke upon the confusion of rocks that edged the steep river bank, a sign of nature's lack of art much less symmetry. Here and there, between the rocks, the water had frozen into solid white sheets, and at night, in bed, Blaise liked to listen to the sc.r.a.pe and crunch not to mention the odd shuddering groans of the ice as it s.h.i.+fted in response to the water sweeping down from Great Falls.

Frederika was so delighted to be living in the country that every chance she got, she would cross the river at Chain Bridge to visit friends in Was.h.i.+ngton, secure in the knowledge that an earthly paradise awaited her on the Virginia side, all ordered garden and wild forests crossed by earthworks from the Civil War, for Laurel House was set on the road to Mana.s.sas where, twice, the Union Army had lost to the Confederates at Bull Run. Up near the greenhouses-built originally in an L shape until Blaise rebuilt the base of the L so that it resembled an evenly balanced T-there was a slave cabin complete with original slave. Although long since freed, he had never fled from the cabin of his birth: he went with the property-thus enslaving the owners to him as he had once been to them. Blaise kept the old man on as a not-so-handyman and a source of folk-lore both Confederate and African; the two, Blaise decided, were much the same. The old man had a set-piece that he enjoyed reciting to anyone who'd listen: how all the fine folk had come out from Was.h.i.+ngton to watch the Union Army defeat the rebels, and how they had pa.s.sed by his cabin on the road-he had been seven or eight years old then, and he had cheered them on. "But they looked mighty different that night, runnin' for home." He was a loyal son of Virginia; and except for Lincoln hated all Yankees.

Frederika came into his room. "Do shut the window. It's freezing." She wore a summery sort of dress, not suitable for a winter lunch, but then lunch was Christmas dinner at the McLean palace in H Street and any costume was all right in that house of fantasy. Enid and Peter followed their mother into Blaise's room, and Peter climbed his father's leg while Enid complained that it was not fair to leave them on Christmas, despite that morning's orgy of present-opening in the pine-scented drawing room where a Christmas tree had been set up, its base surrounded by a thick white snow-like material that contained something very like ground gla.s.s which still caused Blaise, who had been Santa Claus, to squirm with discomfort as it clung to his skin.

"We'll be home early, my pets." Frederika was admirably patient and serene with even the crankiest child. "We'll have supper together. Miss Claypoole will take you out in the sleigh, if there's enough snow."

"There's more than enough up at the stables," said Enid, a dark rather glamorous-looking child. Peter nodded and chewed on a red-and-white-striped candy cane taken from the tree and not meant to be eaten. Peter was always hungry. Frederika worried. Blaise did not. Let children enjoy themselves. Later there would be little enough to enjoy, he maintained, as only a man whose life had been entirely easy and largely happy could.

In procession they descended the carved staircase to the main hall, decorated with holly and mistletoe. Christmas Eve had been their celebration for friends and familiars. Despite Peter's last-minute attempt to get his father to read him Captain Marryat, of all writers, Blaise and Frederika were able to depart without tears.

Snow covered the ground in drifts. The narrow road to Chain Bridge was dangerously icy, and not much helped by the county's addition of rock-salt to its surface. Frederika sat, very alert, as the chauffeur managed the curves like an expert skier. Blaise, who had no fear of accidents-or death?-sat far back in his seat and enjoyed the warmth of the vicuna coverlet.

At Chain Bridge, Frederika relaxed despite the cautionary sight of a Model A Ford that had skidded into the railing. Beneath them the river was filled with shards of ice. The sky over the city was yellow like a cheap diamond. "Evalyn says we're to tell no one but this is the day the President is going to be killed."

"At the McLeans'?"

"If he gets there in one piece. It's very exciting," said Frederika mildly.

"Who would want to kill Warren Harding?"

"The Vice President, I suppose. They say he never speaks but every time I sit next to him at dinner he never stops talking."

"You have that effect on everyone."

"Not you."

"That is a condition of marriage. Long meaningless silences."

They were halfway across the near-deserted city when Frederika observed, "You don't think they'll try, do you?"

"Who'll try what?" Blaise was already in his own world, which, nowadays, involved Paris and a friend's wife and a private room at Prudhomme where, for two centuries, initials had been inscribed on the ancient window pane with diamonds-white and blue but never yellow diamonds.

"The murderers, whoever they are. The Secret Service takes it all very seriously. That's why they were happy to get the President out of the White House and into the I Street house, where, they say, it's easier to guard him, which I doubt."

"I'm sure Evalyn and Ned wrote the letters, just to get the Hardings for Christmas Day."

Frederika shook her head, unconvinced. "They see them all the time. Perhaps anarchists will blow up the house like Mr. Palmer's."

Blaise was greeted warmly by his rival publisher. Ned was on a new regime which he called "English drinking." This involved a first drink at about eleven in the morning and then, at regular intervals throughout the day, he would continue drinking. The result was, so far, satisfactory. Although he was never drunk he was also never sober, very much in the English manner, as Millicent Inverness observed to Blaise, herself a committed Anglophile in these matters.

Evalyn, hung with ill-omened diamonds, did her best to compete with what must have been Was.h.i.+ngton's largest Christmas tree, whose glittering star just grazed the ceiling of the drawing room, which itself was three times higher than any other drawing room in the city. Splendor was the McLean style, and the Hardings seemed as at home as they were out of place in this palace.

Blaise sat beside the President before the fire while the half-dozen ladies gathered around Evalyn. "Well, Blaise," said Harding, nursing a pale whisky and water. "I can't think of a better place to be lulled in."

"Or such an auspicious day."

"Better than April Fool's." Harding chuckled. Blaise had never been able to gauge the President's intelligence. Harding did not read books, and the arts chilled him except for the girlie shows at the Gayety Burlesque theater where he liked to slip, un.o.bserved, into a box, to the delight of the excited manager. But a cultivation of the arts was hardly a sign of practical intelligence. The fact that Harding's career had been one of astonis.h.i.+ng success could not be ascribed solely to brute luck or animal charm. Without luck and charm, Harding would probably not have had a political career. But he had had the luck and the charm and something else as well, hard to define because he was so insistently modest. "Mr. Hughes took them by storm," he said with satisfaction, as if only the Secretary of State had been responsible for the terms of the Disarmament Conference. "I thought Admiral Beatty would have a stroke when Mr. Hughes looked right at him, and told him how many s.h.i.+ps England would have to sc.r.a.p."

Harry Daugherty joined them. "May I?" he asked of the sovereign, who nodded. Daugherty sat next to Blaise. "We're surrounded by the press, Mr. President."

"In the event that I join McKinley and Garfield and Lincoln up there in the sky, I want Ned and Blaise to be witnesses of my last hours on earth, omitting no gruesome detail except one." He held high his drink. "The people must never know that I died violating the Eighteenth Amendment. That would be unseemly."

Then Harding, the publisher and editor of the Marion Star, took over from the President, and Blaise found him both knowledgeable and interesting in their common trade. As they chatted, Blaise was very much aware of the Secret Service men in the hall and in the next room. Their attention was evenly divided between watching the President and observing all conceivable entrances and exits. The secretary of war, John W. Weeks, was allowed to enter, followed by the black-eyed part-Indian Senator Curtis of Kansas. They were a part of what Harding called his poker cabinet. Blaise found the President to be a curious mixture of an almost Buddhistic stillness interrupted, at regular intervals, by a small boy's restlessness. He must play golf. He must play card games, particularly poker. He must travel as much as his office allowed. Constant motion was a necessary distraction. Yet he could, just as easily, remain as still as a statue, self-contained, smiling, content. All in all, he was a mystery to Blaise, but no less enjoyable for that.

As it was Christmas Day, there was no shop-talk, other than a sour remark from Curtis to the effect that Borah was, yet again, disaffected. "He's mad that you're getting all the credit for his Disarmament Conference."

"What can I do?" Harding looked genuinely pained.

"Nothing," said Daugherty. "There's no pleasing that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h."

"Anyway, we have the votes." Curtis blinked his black eyes at Blaise, a disconcerting effect. "Whatever treaty you come up with the Senate will give you."

"Thanks," Daugherty turned to Harding, "to your making Lodge a delegate. That was inspired, Mr. President."

"I'll say it was." Harding chuckled. "Fact, it was literally inspired by President Wilson's not letting him sit in on the League of Nations. You know," Harding gazed at the Secret Service agent in the hall, "when Wilson and I were driving from the White House to the Capitol, I was trying to make conversation, never an easy thing to do with him when he was well and really hard when he was so sick. Anyway, I don't know how I got onto the subject of elephants, but there we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and I'm telling him how these elephants fall in love with their keepers and how jealous they can get, and how, in the case of this one elephant, when her keeper died, she died, too, of grief. Then I looked over and Wilson was crying, and I thought what a strange end to a presidency this was. Strange beginning, too, I suppose, for me."

Christmas dinner was served with the usual McLean lavishness. Ned seemed somewhat bemused by his new regimen but otherwise did not embarra.s.s Evalyn, who quizzed Blaise in great detail about Caroline. "I loved her Mary Queen of Scots and I don't see why everyone was so mean about her."

Blaise murmured something about envy; actually, he himself was envious of Caroline's conquest of the movies, and he wondered why. It was not as if he had ever had the slightest ambition along those lines. Yet the fact that, once again, she had moved beyond him was a source of nagging irritation. Fortunately, her recent failure had been most heartening. Without going to any particular effort, he had somehow managed to read every one of her American reviews. She was, at last, too old, was the verdict. He, of course, was older than she but he did not market his face on the screen as she had done.

"Where is she now?"

"I don't know. I think she's in Paris. She opened up Saint-Cloud in the summer but that's no place to be alone in for Christmas. I suppose she's with friends."

"Isn't there a director ...? Evalyn was eager to gossip.

"Two directors," said Blaise, now compulsively disloyal. "But I don't think she's with either of them. She may be making a picture in Paris, where old age is rather a plus," he added, wondering if he was leering uncontrollably at Evalyn, who now wanted to discuss Mary Pickford. But then everyone wanted to discuss Mary Pickford.

"If you don't want to play poker with the President, I'm showing Mary's new movie, Little Lord Fauntleroy."

"I'll watch," said Blaise, who disliked poker even more than America's sweetheart.

"I got to know her whole family." Evalyn was more involved with Hollywood than Blaise had suspected. But then almost everyone nowadays had two lives, his own and his life at the movies. Although Blaise did his conscious best to ignore Caroline's triumphant new world, he found himself unable not to read any gossip about the stars and he sometimes showed movies at Laurel House when he and Frederika were alone, the ultimate vice.

"Anyway, they are all drunks, the whole lot of them, including Mary and her brother Jack and this wonderful old Irish biddy of a mother who, just before Prohibition came in, went out and bought a whole liquor store and moved all the bottles into her cellar and locked the door to keep Jack out."

"They are most royal these days, the Fairbankses," said Blaise, succ.u.mbing yet again to Hollywood. Caroline had taken him to dinner at Pickfair, where social climbing was very much in the air. t.i.tles were resonated at the table; and royalty was referred to by pet names. But then the king and queen of Hollywood would naturally be interested in their own kind. Warned of Miss Pickford's liking for the bottle, Blaise had watched her keenly. But she was as demure as her screen self, a rather matronly little girl was the effect that she made in real life, while Fairbanks, now that he had come into his own as a swashbuckling athletic star, tended to gallop about the room, lecturing on strength both physical and moral. Apropos divorce, a sore subject, he announced, "Caesar and Napoleon were both divorced men, and no one can say that they were weak!" Thus he cla.s.sed himself.

Fairbanks's mother-in-law was more engaging, particularly when she confided to Blaise that "Mary gives her most as an actress when she's got a good director on top of her."

After dinner, the sated guests sat about the Christmas tree, waiting for the President to be a.s.sa.s.sinated. In low voices, the men spoke of the Fatty Arbuckle-Hollywood again-scandal. Harding was particularly fascinated by the details, which the Secretary of War had mastered.

During the course of a wild party in San Francisco, the hugely fat comedian Arbuckle, a one-time plumber as the press never forgot to mention, hurled himself onto a young woman, much experienced at parties, and, inadvertently, he burst her bladder-or so the story went. Daily, the press, including Ned McLean and Blaise, printed horrendous stories about the new Babylon while Hearst daily exhorted the Almighty, if not the police, to destroy this city of the plain and turn all its inhabitants, save Marion Davies, to salt. The hapless Arbuckle had finally brought down the concerted wrath of Puritan America on the sinful movie stars who, after celebrating every sort of immorality on-screen then, off-screen, busily burst the bladders of virgin girls and worse. The patriarchal spirit that deprived all Americans of alcohol was now abroad again in the land, and Blaise was ashamed to be a part of it. But he had little choice in the matter: one newspaper followed another until a story had finally run its course. This one seemed nowhere near its terminus. Aside from Arbuckle and his trial, there were more and more stories about drug addiction among the stars and everyone now agreed that something must be done.

Harding echoed the popular cry, without much enthusiasm. "The movie people want the government to come in and police them. But how can we? That isn't our function. Police yourselves, I told Mr. Zukor."

Senator Curtis observed that the Postmaster General had been approached about becoming a czar of the movie business, to pa.s.s on everyone's morality. Curtis chuckled, "Can't you see Will Hays, with all them starlets sitting on his lap?"

"I'm sure," said the President, surrept.i.tiously lighting his first cigar-the d.u.c.h.ess was facing in the opposite direction-"that Will has great control and he'll do nothing improper, if he takes the job."

This was news. "Has he been offered the job?" asked Blaise.

Harding nodded. "But don't tell anybody just yet. He hasn't made up his mind. And of course I don't want him leaving the Cabinet, particularly now."

Blaise knew that Fall also wanted to resign, and two resignations at the same time would not be-seemly, to employ one of the President's favorite words.

Daugherty wondered if any movie had ever encouraged anyone to a life of crime or vice. By and large, the men agreed that it was unlikely, unless the sinner was already so disposed. But Curtis came up with an interesting variation. "There's no doubt in my mind that movies and plays and books give people plot ideas, including criminals. The badger game, for instance."

To a man, the politicians beside the Christmas tree shuddered. Harding nodded somberly and said, "There's no doubt that when Senator Gore wouldn't help out those oil men one of them thought of that play, the Purple something."

"Deep Purple," said Daugherty.

"What was that all about?" Blaise had only a vague memory of the blind Senator's trial.

"A few years back, there was this real popular play," said Curtis. "Everybody saw it. How a bunch of gangsters set up an innocent man with a woman. Well, one day this woman, a const.i.tuent, calls up Senator Gore about getting an appointment to West Point for her son, and she says can he come by her hotel, as she's lame, and so he does, with his secretary, and they all meet in the lobby, and of course Gore's blind and can't see her or what she's up to when she says, let's go up to the mezzanine. But instead of going there, she takes him to her room, tears her dress, starts to scream 'Rape!' and a couple of crooks hired by the oil men come rus.h.i.+ng in and say, 'We got you.' "

"Could happen to almost any senator," said Harding sadly.

"It could certainly happen to any senator who happens to be blind." Weeks was precise.

Daugherty was even more precise. "Particularly if the folks out to get you had seen Deep Purple."

When Gore had refused to be blackmailed, charges were brought against him for attempted rape. He had then insisted on standing trial in Oklahoma City. The whole affair had been exceedingly melodramatic, Blaise now recalled, even to the last-minute appearance of a widow from Boston who had observed what had happened from her hotel-room window. Gore was exonerated. "Proving," said Harding, "that no trouble with a woman ever lost a man a vote."

"Unless her bladder bursts," said Curtis.

The d.u.c.h.ess and Evalyn joined the gentlemen. Evalyn said, "I've talked to the Secret Service and they say that the safest place in the house is the sitting room to my bedroom. Ned's up there now, with the cards."

"Be careful, Warren!" The d.u.c.h.ess was genuinely frightened.

"Why, dearie, when am I not?"

Blaise remained with the ladies to see Little Lord Fauntleroy. Millicent, Countess Inverness, drifted off to sleep, and snored while the d.u.c.h.ess fidgeted, and Evalyn took her hand from time to time. Blaise day-dreamed; only Frederika was intent upon the adventures of a stocky thirty-year-old matron as she impersonated, in the most sinister way, a p.u.b.escent boy.

At first, Blaise thought that a bomb had gone off somewhere upstairs. They all leapt to their feet except Mrs. Harding, who slipped off her chair and now lay like some stranded sea-creature on the parquet floor. "Florence. Here!" Evalyn pulling Mrs. Harding to her feet.

"I know. I know what's happened. It was foretold in the stars. Take me to him. Now. It's all come true. All of it. Just like she said, Oh, G.o.d!"

Mrs. Harding was now in the hallway where a Secret Service man smilingly rea.s.sured her. "The wind slammed a door shut. That's all."

From far above them, Harding's mellifluous voice could be heard. "Don't worry, d.u.c.h.ess. They missed me."