The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 11

"You preferred Roosevelt. I know." Blaise quickly apologized for the gaffe. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"I heard nothing but the music, dear Blaise, and saw nothing but my beloved wife over there, teaching a senator the fox-trot."

"What you have done-do for England!"

"Only my all. You know," Spring Rice was, for an instant, serious, "the President-and Colonel House, his Buckingham-believes that there should be a post-war league-a covenant-of all countries, to keep the peace."

"So do I. So does Taft, who gave him the idea."

"So, I suppose, do I. But then I'm a barometer, too, an old infirm foreign barometer, admittedly, but I can usually predict the weather in these parts-at least the storms, when I-the barometer-start falling. These people, your people, will never join such an organization."

Blaise was surprised. After all, it was the received opinion of those who led the state and molded public opinion that such an organization was highly desirable. If they could so easily make the people hate all things German, they could certainly make them love a bureaucratic means of forever keeping peace. "I see no obstacle. Republicans are even more in favor of a league than Democrats."

"It won't work like that. Americans are too used to going alone in the world. You're also at the start of your own empire, and no rising empire ever wants to commit itself to peace when there are still so many profitable wars to fight."

"You astonish me."

Caroline and a lean, dark blue-eyed man approached them. Although introductions were made, Blaise did not hear the man's name. Plainly, he was not from Washington. Caroline was splendid, all in gold; and looked a decade younger than she had before the trip to California, where, on Creel's instructions, she had excited the motion-picture business to even greater, if possible, propaganda efforts. Spring Rice was led away by Ned McLean, whose sobriety was now drawing to a close, along with the year.

"I've heard so much about you." The accent was Boston Irish. This was the sort of thing one met in California, thought Blaise, censoriously. He wondered if Caroline was having an affair with him.

"Well, I've heard nothing about you." Blaise radiated what he hoped was charm. "But that's Caroline's fault."

"Your fault," said Caroline. "We don't see each other outside the office."

"We don't see each other in the office either." Blaise was genial. "There is an editor who keeps us apart. What are you doing here?"

"Visiting Caroline." Yes, this was her lover. Women, Blaise noted, not for the first time, had no taste in men. Of course, the Irishman was younger than she, and, happily, their French upbringing had released them from that powerful American taboo, the monster older woman who, like a vampire, drains-dissipates-the rare essence of innocent young manhood. French women, in bed as well as in the market, valued les primeurs. "Timothy has never been to Washington before. So I wanted to show him a typical party."

"It's just like DeMille," said Timothy.

"DeMille who?" asked Blaise.

At that moment, all the lights in the ballroom went out. Then one end of the room was lit up with a thousand red, white and blue lights that spelled out "Good Luck to the Allies in 1918." There was cheering. The orchestra played "Auld Lang Syne." There was loud singing. Blaise kissed Caroline's cheek, and shook Timothy's hand. Caroline then kissed Timothy on the lips. "I am," she said to Blaise, through all the noise of paper-crackers and band music, "going to make a movie in 1918."

Then the lights came on again and the dancing started up. Blaise turned to Caroline, who was definitely having an affair with Timothy. "I'm getting deaf," he said. "I thought you said you were going to make a movie in 1918."

"I did, Blaise. I am." Caroline and Timothy joined the dancers. Frederika appeared for Blaise to embrace. "His name," said Frederika, omitting the Happy New Year, "is Timothy X. Farrell. He directs-or is it conducts?-photo-plays."

"I had hoped he was a chauffeur," said Blaise, in a good mood. "Anyway, whatever Hearst does, she does. Perhaps she found him in the chorus of the Follies."

"Good for her, I say. She was bored." Frederika took a gla.s.s of champagne from a waiter.

"She isn't bored now." Then Blaise and Frederika began the new year with a waltz.

FOUR.

1.

FOR CAROLINE, LOVE HAD ALWAYS MEANT-if anything-separation. In the golden days of her affair with Burden, she was allowed to see him only on Sundays in Washington; with rare excursions elsewhere, to exotic river cities like St. Louis, and to the wonderful blankness of hotel rooms. She had not needed Burden-or anyone-every day. She had had a full life, beginning with her seven years' war against Blaise for her share of the Sanford inheritance. Although Blaise had won the war in the sense that she had received her capital when she was twenty-seven and not, as their father's will required, twenty-one, she had scored the greater victory by acquiring a moribund Washington newspaper and making a success of it, largely because Blaise had always wanted to be a publisher, like his friend and sometime employer Hearst. But it was Caroline not Blaise who had re-created the Washington Tribune. Finally, at a peace conference in exotic St. Louis, she had allowed him to buy into the paper while she kept control.

But control of what? she wondered, as she carefully crossed the icy sidewalk in front of Henry Adams's Romanesque villa across from the Byzantine-cla.s.sical St. John's Church, whose gilded cupola mocked the demure primness of Lafayette Park. Whatever urge that she might have had for political power had been entirely extinguished by her years in Washington. Seen close to, the rulers of the country were no different from the ruled, or if they were, she could not tell the difference. Money mattered, and nothing else. For anyone who had been brought up in a nation whose most famous play was called The Miser, this was more agreeable than not, particularly if one had enough of what mattered. The problem now was what to do with what remained of her life. Tim, as she now somewhat self-consciously called Farrell, had entered her orderly life like a sudden high wind at a Newport picnic, and everything was in a state of disorder.

In Los Angeles, their days were spent in the surprisingly small barn-like buildings where photo-plays were created at a very rapid rate; and their nights at early "supper," as it was called in California, with the world-famous men and women who were the stars, each tinier than the other; only their large heads in proportion to their small bodies demonstrated some obscure Darwinian principle that when evolution required movie stars those best adapted to the screen-large heads atop small neat bodies-would be ready to make the journey to Southern California "because there's sun all year round," the town proclaimed. Actually, there was fog almost every morning and a thousand other places would have been more suitable except for one crucial detail-the Mexican border was only a hundred miles away. Since all the moving-picture makers in California were using equipment developed by that protean genius Edison, and since none acknowledged his patents, the village was filled with hard-eyed detectives, waiting to catch a glimpse of something called the Latham Loop, which, if found in use, could lead to gunfire and endless lawsuits: Caroline had enjoyed the frontier life. She had also enjoyed her first affair in many years. Although Irish and often drunk, Tim was, to use the popular new verb, enthused by s.e.x, and Caroline felt herself grow younger by the day. She also never ceased to ache in every joint, because, as Heloise wisely and proudly said, "you are at last using all your muscles." Caroline felt like a wrestler in training as she and Tim tried to make as little noise as possible in the Garden Court Apartments, from which-except for them-all movie people had been excluded by the Iowan management. Tim explained to Caroline that most of Hollywood's residents were peaceful retired Middle Western farm folk who were stunned to find their village suddenly overwhelmed by beauty and vice, by Jews and process-servers.

Tim had gone back to California right after the New Year. In due course, Caroline would join him, but for now she remained in Washington. Hearst had already proposed that she buy into his new venture, Cosmopolitan Pictures, currently making movies in his own New York studio at Second Avenue and 127th Street. But Caroline was wary of Hearst. For one thing, he could absorb her too easily; for another, she and Blaise had been startled to learn that Hearst was negotiating to buy the Washington Times in order to do for it what she had done for the Tribune. Blaise had agreed with her that they should keep Hearst out of Washington even if it meant buying the Times themselves, and merging it with the Tribune. Finally, if Caroline was to fulfill her war-time task, Southern California was the place to be. Also, that was where Tim was. Seize the day, as Burden had liked to joke when their bodies were new to one another.

Henry Adams had always been of movie-star size but now, with age, he was almost no longer present in the room. The large bald bearded head seemed unattached as it floated close to the floor in the study that always smelled of lilies and roses no matter what the season. It was here, thought Caroline, as they embraced, her Washington life had begun; now was it here that it would end? Was she fated to end her days at the other end of the United States, wearing puttees and riding breeches, shouting orders through a megaphone at tiny actors, once the Santa Monica fog had finally burned away?

"I'm early."

"I'm late. Far too late." Adams helped her to a chair beside the fire. All in gray, Aileen Tone greeted her softly. It was Caroline's impression that Adams was kept like some rare fragile Faberge egg in a carefully arranged, all-cushioned and heated, nest: would the egg then hatch? Yes, if death was the final hatching.

"Theodore, Rex that was, is in the town. But why do I tell you when you are the town."

"The voice has been heard, it's true. Is he coming to lunch?"

"Here? Oh, no. I have standards, not high, I confess, except in the case of nieces, but certain big fish can never make it up the river to me. She comes, though. My eldest niece, Edith, and daughter Alice."

"I like her-or 'she.' " It was taken by some as a sign of Roosevelt's fragile health that his wife Edith had come to Washington with him in the wake of the President's Fourteen Points (four more than G.o.d's, was the current joke) that had been submitted to the Congress. The princ.i.p.al point involved a league of all the nations that would, at the first sign of stress between any of its members, soothe and adjudicate and make war unthinkable.

Theodore Roosevelt had rushed to town to address the National Press Club. He had denounced the War Department that had refused his services and, indirectly, the President. He had been scornful, as usual, of Wilson's "peace without victory"; and declared, "Let us dictate peace by the hammering guns and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters." At the time, Caroline had duly noted the first verb. But Blaise had vetoed a Tribune essay on the necessity or non-necessity of a dictator in time of war, something that such a pacific figure as Harding of Ohio thought desirable. In American life there had been no Bonapartes or sun kings-only the ambiguous Lincoln. If nothing else, because of their French birth, Caroline and Blaise had been inoculated against that virus. But Henry Adams's brother Brooks had apparently succ.u.mbed. "He cries like an infant for a dictator," said Adams, a faint smile perceptible within the beard. "Then he howls, like Cabot, whenever Wilson does anything dictatorial. There is no pleasing my brother."

"Or you?"

"Oh, I delight, humbly, in the crash of all that I have ever held dear. But I've always been boringly in advance of everyone. Poor Brooks considers the world to be going to the devil with the greatest rapidity, and I console him, as best I can, in my merry way, by telling him that the world went there ten years ago."

"That is consolation." Caroline found it hard to believe that Uncle Henry, as he was known to her without quotation marks, would be eighty in a few weeks.

Adams picked up a slender volume. "You know George Santayana?"

Caroline nodded. Half-Spanish, half-Boston, he had taught philosophy at Harvard alongside, when not at odds with, Henry James's brother William. He had written a number of works on the reason of life or the life of reason. Caroline had never read him; but she remembered vividly the dark shining eyes at their one Boston meeting.

"He's just written some very elegant propaganda. No doubt inspired by the great Theodore. Aileen, do read the marked page." As she took the book from Adams, he turned his still-bright gaze upon Caroline. "I am now blind."

"No," Caroline began.

"Yes." Adams was matter-of-fact. "Three months ago, the light went out. Do read, Aileen."

Miss Tone obliged. " 'In their tentative many-sided way the Germans have been groping for four hundred years towards a restoration of their primitive heathenism.' "

Adams interrupted. "Now that makes sense. Remember, the Teutonic tribes were the last to be Christianized, and they still resent the experience. That's why, ever since, they have been at war, in one way or another, with Christendom."

"You make them sound most sympathetic." Caroline had been painlessly separated from Christianity by Mlle. Souvestre; and had no longings.

"You are a Bolshevik, I suppose. That's the latest thing. It's also the future thing. Brooks is right. We have lived to see the end of a republican form of government, which is, after all, merely an intermediate stage between monarchy and anarchy, between the Czar and the Bolsheviks."

"Everyone says you've become a Roman Catholic," announced Alice Longworth, as she entered the room with her stepmother, Edith-"long-suffering Edith" was the Homeric tag Caroline mentally attached to the older woman, who had coped marvelously well with five boys of whom the most tiresome was her husband, while relations with Alice were always edgy.

Adams greeted the ladies warmly. "I've heard the rumor, too. My conversion is a German war-aim, and will fail like everything else they put their hand to. 'Subjectivity in thought,' as Santayana describes them, 'and willfulness in morals.' "

"Is that you, Uncle Henry?" Alice had not heard the "them."

"No. The Germans. I think poor Springy started the rumor about me, to liven our spirits."

"I do miss him," said Alice.

Edith took the throne by the fire where, in earlier days, Clara Hay had always sat; now Clara was dead and of the original Five of Hearts only Adams remained. "Theodore thinks Mr. Wilson had him sent home, out of spite."

"Theodore would think that." Adams was mild. "I'm sorry he couldn't come. Politics?"

"What else?" Edith sighed. "He sits in poor Alice's dining room like a pasha, and they all come to him. He's with the New York delegation now. He wears himself out. And his stomach is upset."

"Wait till he dines tonight with cousin Eleanor and the wrong Roosevelt." Alice's gray-blue eyes glittered in the winter light from Lafayette Park. "Eleanor has become the Lucrezia Borgia of Washington-none survives her table."

To Caroline's surprise, they were joined by no one. "I want you three all to myself," said Adams. "I'm tired of men, and allergic to politicians, and grow rabid at the sight of a uniform."

"All my brothers are overseas. Father is jealous."

"Yes." Adams's voice was, for an instant, ominous. But then he lightened the mood. "You'll doubtless be calling on your successor across the road." He put his arm through Edith's and led them into the dining room, where his usual late breakfast or early lunch was set up.

"Oh, you can imagine that." Edith was amused. "I suspect I'm the last person she'd want to see, coming in the door like the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"They say," said Alice, who always said what they were saying, "that her brothers are stealing everything that's not nailed down."

"Now, Alice." Edith's voice was both weary and warning.

"Mother insists that if you were not actually in the room during the crime it could not have happened." But Alice dropped the subject. Edith was the only person who seemed to intimidate her; certainly, her father did not. Once criticized for Alice's escapades, the then President had famously said, "I can regulate my daughter or I can preside over the United States. But I cannot do both."

As Adams and Edith exchanged news-illness, funerals, wills-Alice murmured to Caroline, "Franklin thinks Eleanor doesn't know, and I think she does."

Caroline's response was swift. "She wouldn't say if she knew."

Alice was surprised. "Why not?"

"I would have to tell you all about our mutual schoolteacher ..."

"The atheist Mlle. Souvestre. I know. I think I really know." Alice's malice had the same sort of joyous generalized spontaneity as did her father's hypocrisy.

Caroline let the bait slip by. "Eleanor will notice nothing until there is something to notice, and it is my guess, as a fellow Catholic, de la famille, that Lucy Mercer will not go to bed with Franklin until she is safely married."

Alice was deeply interested by so European, so papist a viewpoint. "You mean married to Franklin?"

"Preferably. But marriage to anyone makes adultery a possibility, even a necessity. Don't you think?"

Alice, for the first time in Caroline's long experience of her, blushed. Plainly, a lucky hit. But if Alice had found a lover she had been superbly discreet. "At last I understand vice. We Americans are so much simpler. If it itches, scratch it. But no fuss, no divorces, no marriages-I mean, just for that. I saw them together, out driving, Franklin and Lucy, coming from Chevy Chase. I told Franklin I'd seen them, and that he'd almost wrecked the car staring at her, and he said, cool as could be, 'Beautiful, isn't she?' I have them to the house, when Eleanor's out of town." Alice frowned. "But they could never marry each other. She's Catholic. He isn't."

"Worse. She's Catholic. He's political. He can't have a career and be divorced." Caroline had always felt that Eleanor's position was impregnable, thanks to Franklin's astonishing ambition-astonishing because, amiable and charming as he was, he seemed curiously lacking in any real political sense, as he had recently demonstrated when he ran for senator from New York, only to be sunk without a trace by the Hearst-Tammany money machine. Luckily, he still had his job at the Navy Department; still had the magical name.

Henry Adams and Edith Roosevelt were bemoaning the loss of Springy.

"He was best man at our wedding in London. I don't think Theodore has ever had so wise a friend."

"Nor I so civilized a one." Adams mournfully ate cornbread, a dish that Caroline delighted in only at his table. "Springy's great unsung contribution was his manipulation of the Jewish bankers in New York-and their press. Almost to a man, they were for the Kaiser ..."

"The editor of the New York Times did hold out." Caroline had been much involved in the newspaper intrigues of 1914. Kuhn, Loeb & Company had threatened to take over the pro-Allies Times, while other pressures were brought to bear on the press by Jacob Schiff and the American brother of the German Warburgs. Wilson had steered a delicate course. A number of pro-German Jewish bankers had given money to his campaign, a.s.suming that he would "keep us out of war" against their beloved Germany. Wilson had mollified them by appointing Warburg to the Federal Reserve Board and the country's leading Zionist, Louis Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Caroline had been present at the White House when Wilson suddenly quoted Scripture to Spring Rice: " 'He that keepeth Israel shall neither shun her nor sleep.' "

"Springy can also take credit for Mr. Balfour's note of last November, when he undid all the zealous work of Christendom by restoring Holy Zion to the Jews. I believe Mr. Schiff now plans to rebuild the Temple, out of his own pocket."

"But surely you must be a Zionist, Uncle Henry." Like everyone in Washington, Alice knew that the very thought of the Jews made Adams apoplectic. "They will then all be in one place which you won't ever have to visit."

But Adams saw fit to respond, sweetly. "But I do want to visit. And now that the British have taken Jerusalem away from the Turks, I wish to gaze reverently upon our holy of holies, the petrified heart of Christendom."

"I think, Henry," said Edith Roosevelt in the tone that she used to quiet her husband, "that you are becoming blasphemous ..."

"... at breakfast, too," Alice added.

Aileen Tone changed the subject. Caroline thought of love and age. Lately, she found that she had become like every other woman of her acquaintance and age, totally self-absorbed. Only that morning, Emma had said, "You must stop staring at yourself in mirrors."

Caroline had rallied sufficiently to say, "How else can I see myself, except in a mirror?"

"You are intolerable," said Emma, now in her second year at Bryn Mawr; and interested in mathematics. But that was Emma's problem. Caroline had now become Caroline's problem. Of course, there was a way to see oneself other than in a mirror and that was on the screen. Caroline, Caroline decided, looking down at the pale blind ancient Henry Adams, was not herself, was mad. At the door to the study, she suddenly kissed Adams on the cheek.

"Try not to forget us," the old man said. Thus the fifth and final Heart bade Caroline farewell.

2.

A RECENT BOMBARDMENT HAD SHATTERED a grove of trees, stripping them of leaves, branches. In the diffuse light, they looked like a company of dead men stripped of flesh. Between the trees, there were trenches, demarked by barbed wire. On the ground, the dead, American dead. Some looked as if they were asleep. Some stared in horror at the end. Some were unidentifiable as to species.

The Red Cross nurse moved slowly through the woods. From time to time, she would stop at a figure on the ground; stare hard at the face. She wore a dark cloak, creased and soiled; and a man's muddy boots. Finally, at the edge of the grove, she knelt beside a body. She reached out a hand as if to touch the forehead of the staring face. Then stopped; froze.

"Cut!" Tim's megaphoned voice was authoritative. "That was lovely, Emma."

Caroline-known to the studio and "in art" as Emma Traxler-stood up and stepped off the set and into the bright Santa Monica sun. The gray diffuse light of Belleau Wood in France was the work of a gauze net over a platform where skeletal trees and living dead men and lifeless dummies had been carefully arranged by Timothy X. Farrell and his art director.

"Set up the close shot." Tim turned to Caroline. "We have a visitor. Mr. Ince himself."