The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 18

"Surely, D. W. Griffith-" Caroline began.

"He's Jewish, too. But denies it. Because he's a Southerner, and wants to be mistaken for a gentleman, G.o.d help him. Besides, he was an actor." Hearst employed the most horrible epithet of their cla.s.s.

"I'm an actor." Marion glared over her winegla.s.s.

"No," Hearst said mildly, "you're a star."

"All in all," said Caroline, suddenly a hard, cold business woman, "there's a lot of money in movies."

The Chief nodded. "Yes. Mine."

They were joined by Edgar Hatrick, the eager young man who was in charge of Hearst's movie enterprises. Since they were obviously about to discuss their business, Caroline excused herself and walked through chilly streets to the Plaza, a comfortable modern hotel that had replaced, in 1907, an earlier Plaza Hotel.

In the drawing room of Caroline's suite, the ten newspapers that she studied every day from all around the country were neatly stacked, and as she went through them, one by one, to see how different stories were covered, she found herself daydreaming about movies. They were insidious. They were like waking dreams that then, in sleep, usurped proper dreams. There was power here but she was not sure what it was. There was crude propaganda of the sort that she had made at Creel's insistence. But newspapers could do that sort of thing, too. There was more to this new fad than anyone had grasped, and she could understand why Hearst, too, was bemused by the whole thing. A moving picture was, to begin with, a picture of something that had really happened. She had really clubbed a French actor with a wooden crucifix on a certain day and at a certain time and now there existed, presumably forever, a record of that stirring event. But Caroline Sanford was not the person millions of people had watched in that ruined French church. They had watched the fict.i.tious Emma Traxler impersonate Madeleine Giroux, a Franco-American mother, as she picked up a crucifix that looked to be metal but was not and struck a French actor impersonating a German officer in a ruined French church that was actually a stage-set in Santa Monica. The audience knew, of course, that the story was made up as they knew that stage plays were imitations of life, but the fact that an entire story could so surround them as a moving picture did and so, literally, inhabit their dreams, both waking and sleeping, made for another reality parallel to the one they lived in. For two hours in actual time Caroline was three different people as a light shone through a moving strip of film. Reality could now be entirely invented and history revised. Suddenly, she knew what G.o.d must have felt when he gazed upon chaos, with nothing but himself upon his mind.

SIX.

1.

BLAISE SHOOK HIS STEPBROTHER'S HAND. Since the death of Plon, Andre was now Prince d'Agrigente. Ten years older than Blaise, he looked as if he could have been Blaise's father. The hair was white. The face was white; only the black eyes seemed alive in all that arctic bleakness. Like Plon, he had married money; unlike Plon he had maintained good relations with his wife, whom he saw several times a year. She lived at Aix-les-Bains in a family house. He stayed in Paris, with his mistress and her two children, neither his, he would say with a bitter pride, as he had been impotent for twenty years.

Blaise gazed with more curiosity than fondness at the stepbrother whom he had hardly known. Andre stayed close to Paris and Blaise stayed close to the Tribune. "You're thin," said Blaise, as they entered the bar of the Grillon. For all practical purposes, the entire hotel had been taken over by the American delegation.

"You're not," said Andre, looking about curiously. "I've never seen so many Americans all at once."

"Come to America."

"Why bother? They come to us. Do you like them?"

"I am one."

"I don't think so."

"I do." Blaise found them a table near the bar. The room barked and growled with English. Most of the men were relatively young, and there were not many ladies on view, since the President had insisted on absolute seriousness for the thousand or so American men who had come to Paris to arrange eternal peace for all mankind. Everyone took himself very seriously, the President most of all.

Andre ordered whisky; like the rest of his generation, he was very much in the English style. Blaise drank Pernod. "Is this president of yours as stupid as he appears?" Andre was above politics but not above Saint-Simon. The characters, not the politics, of important personages amused him.

"How stupid does he appear to you?" Blaise was surprised to discover he was deeply annoyed when Europeans criticized anything American; something he himself never ceased to do.

"Those speeches!" Andre's eyes rolled upward. "He is so ... so Protestant."

"Well, that is the nature of his mission."

"A messiah? Well, I can see that. Everyone can see that when he drives through the crowds, and the crowds go mad with stupidity, too. I watched him make his entrance here. The saint from across the water. I suppose now he'll go home where he belongs."

"No. He stays until the middle of February. Then he goes home, to adjourn Congress. Then he says he'll come back."

Lansing had appeared in the door to the bar. There was an immediate hush. Then two men rose from a table and joined him, and the three departed. "Is that a great man?"

"No. Just the Secretary of State, one of the peace commissioners." When Wilson had appointed the American commission he had taken no one's advice. Arbitrarily, the President had chosen Lansing, House, a general from the Supreme War Council and, as token Republican, that ancient enchanter-diplomat Henry White, a man of no political weight save his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, now storming Valhalla or wherever it is that strenuous heroes go.

After the President's triumphant entrance into Paris, even Blaise was optimistic that the treaty would soon be drafted. Technically, this was the Preliminary Peace Conference which would agree upon the terms to which the Germans, when they eventually joined the conference proper, must submit. But despite worldly laurels, the President did not immediately have his way. Since the conference was not yet ready to begin, Wilson was encouraged by Prime Minister Lloyd George to show himself to a grateful England and by Prime Minister Orlando to a grateful Italy. Thus, two weeks had been agreeably wasted. The crowds were head-turning; and the head that was turned, as the premiers had shrewdly intended, was that of Wilson. He returned to his Paris quarters, the Palais Murat, tired but exalted.

During this time, Blaise had worked with Colonel House, whose staff occupied much of the third floor of the Crillon, under the supervision of his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, a cousin of the ubiquitous Apgars. Blaise acted as an unofficial liaison with the French press, which tended to mordancy on the subject of their savior, taking their cue from Clemenceau, whose view of those who would change man's nature was sardonic when not sulphurous. The conservative Andre echoed the radical Clemenceau in this dark view of the human race. "It is pointless to ask us not to do everything possible to smash Germany to pieces. Look what they have done to us this time. Look what they did in 1870 ..."

"Look what we did to them under Napoleon ..."

"They kill more people these days, and the survivors remember longer. My dear Blaise, the Germans will come back one day if we don't split them up into little countries the way they were before Bismarck."

Blaise knew all the arguments; all the answers. That was the problem with politics, whether domestic or international. As the great questions were always posed in the same way, they invited answers that were equally predictable and unchanging. How anything was resolved remained to Blaise a mystery. He a.s.sumed that this particular conference would be "won" by the most patient faction. Sooner or later, Wilson would tire. Yet Blaise was also convinced that the President was most certainly an agent of history, occupying the right place at the right time, and when all force was so gathered in someone with a plan, the Clemenceaus and Lloyd Georges and Orlandos would be powerless. Even Blaise had been impressed by the size of the crowds in the three countries that had lost millions of men during the last four years while even more millions had died of flu.

George Creel joined them, as if he had been invited. Andre gazed at him with the amused curiosity of someone at a circus, eager to be delighted by strangeness. "How is room 315?" Creel liked to pretend that he and Blaise were in warring camps, which, in a sense, they were. Colonel House and Lansing were at permanent odds, a situation reflected in the staff of each. Although Creel was the master propagandist, Colonel House and his son-in-law were formidable manipulators of the press, as Blaise could appreciate rather better than anyone else. Because Colonel House was apparently so self-effacing, his was the only face that anyone of importance wished to confront. He who had been Wilson's eyes and ears was now thought to be the great man's brain. In due course, Wilson would grasp all this, and unless Blaise had entirely misunderstood human vanity, the President would free himself of the whispering Texas charmer. Lansing was too unimaginative to make trouble between Wilson and House, while Creel could do so only indirectly. On the George Washington, it had been Blaise's impression that Wilson was not well pleased by either man. Each had told him, in his own way, that he ought not to commit the prestige of the presidency to what, after all, would be no more than a sort of cut-throat poker game, where gamblers cheated and knives glinted. But Wilson was filled with missionary zeal, worsened by the crowds that proved to him that he was the divine instrument of all the hopes of every single sweaty component of those gray-pink-brown hordes which, like vast stains, flooded ancient squares and swirled headlong down wide modern streets. The smell of the Paris crowd had been enough to drive Blaise back to his room at the Crillon on the third floor, where Colonel House reigned in well-publicized secrecy. "Three-fifteen wants to get started as soon as possible. What about the second floor?"

"Lansing is having his problems with Clemenceau." Creel was direct. Then turned to Andre. "I a.s.sume you aren't his nephew, or a member of the Cabinet?"

"No. I am idle. I have always been idle. But I like nothing more than watching the ants run about after their hill has been kicked over." Blaise was delighted that his old-world connection made not the slightest effort to accommodate the new world.

"That's one way of looking at it." Creel was indifferent to malice. "Clemenceau would like to wait until things have settled down before the haggling starts. Lansing wants to start now, but leave the League of Nations until after the treaty is signed."

Blaise nodded. "Since the President is more interested in the League than in the treaty, Lansing shouldn't be surprised at the influence of the third floor." House always supported the President, to his face. Lansing dared argue, up to a point.

"Certainly," said Creel, vibrant in his own malice. "The Colonel is well supported by his family. They outnumber the delegation."

"A loving family man is everywhere admired." But Blaise had been surprised by the Colonel's unexpected recklessness when it came to his private arrangements. Save for Edith, Wilson had brought none of his own family, including his son-in-law Francis Sayre, who had worked for the Inquiry. Wilson had also discouraged everyone except the highest officials from bringing wives. Yet House had brought his sister as well as his daughter and her husband, Gordon Auchincloss, who had, in turn, brought along his law partner and his wife. Currently, House was trying to a.s.sign Auchincloss to the President as a secretary during the conference, and Mrs. Wilson was taking a darker and darker view of the less and less gray eminence of House. Wilson himself was sphinx-like, pursuing his own high destiny in his own eloquent way. There were storm warnings everywhere.

"Clemenceau used to live in America." Creel waved to a departing group from the Inquiry. Tonight would be an easy night for everyone. The next day the conference would begin at ten-thirty, January 18, the forty-eighth anniversary of Bismarck's declaration of the Second Reich in the fallen capital of France. With grim pleasure, Clemenceau had picked the date. "He was married to a New York girl, and then divorced."

"That," said Andre, eyes glittering, "explains his love for America."

"The divorce," asked Blaise, "or the marriage?"

"The experience."

"Did you see your ... uh, sister's photo-play?" Creel knew there was some relationship between Andre and Caroline.

"My half-sister. No. I've never seen a photo-play, actually. I play bridge. One can't do both. But I have read about Les Boches de l'Enfer, and I see that someone has taken our grandmother's name, Emma Traxler. Is it Caroline?"

"No," said Blaise, not certain whether or not Creel was in on the game.

"No," said Creel, smiling to show that he did know. "She only produces movies."

"It sounds," said Andre, "like a magician, producing something from a hat."

"It is." Blaise took out his watch. The mistress of his youth had invited him for ten o'clock, the new fashionable hour in war-time Paris, a city still luxurious despite ration books and shortages. Creel saw the watch; and got to his feet.

"I have a late dinner or an early supper," said Blaise. "You'll be there tomorrow, for the opening?"

Creel nodded. "I'll watch until I'm thrown out."

"I'll do the same, I suppose."

House had told Blaise that it could be arranged for him to attend. But if a place had not been arranged for Lansing's Creel, Blaise was not about to provoke wrath by letting it be known that one had been arranged for House's Sanford. Actually, the preliminaries were open to a variety of privileged observers, while the actual conference was closed and secret-if seventy-two delegates from twenty-six nations could be relied on not to tell the world more than it wanted to know on the subject of new boundaries. The entire map of central Europe was being redrawn and, theoretically, Wilson held the blue pencil that would create new countries like Czechoslovakia while dismembering, if not erasing, ancient empires like that of Austria.

"I hope Colonel House is recovered." Creel said farewell to Andre.

"Oh, the flu came and went, like the President." When Wilson had come to the Crillon to visit House, he had pa.s.sed Lansing's office but he had not stopped to greet that great officer of state. There had been scandal.

"But the gallbladder is still full of stones." Creel was gone.

"I don't understand Americans." Andre did not sound deprived.

"I wouldn't bother. You don't need to understand-us."

"Yes. You are one. Is Caroline?"

"Most of all. She has gone native."

"Our mother did, too. And brought us home your father, and you, too, of course."

"Yes. She is the link, Emma de Traxler Schuyler d'Agrigente Sanford. But no blood of mine."

"Tant pis," said Andre, reverting to their first language. Blaise wondered why Emma's descendants were all so proud of a woman who, Caroline had discovered, had deliberately allowed Blaise's mother to die giving birth to him so that she could then marry his father and the Sanford money. Of course, they all enjoyed their left-handed descent from Aaron Burr through Emma's father, who had been one of the many natural sons of that brilliant vice president who was now known only for the killing of Alexander Hamilton. In youth, Blaise had been excited and somewhat horrified to have two murderers, by marriage, in the family. But the arbitrariness of so many recent deaths from war and plague had quite erased murder's glamour in a flood of statistics that could only be grasped when one realized that Plon, say, was no longer there to talk to, ever again.

Blaise had been an adolescent when he first became the lover of Anne de Bieville, whose son, older than he, had then become his closest friend. Blaise had maintained the affair even at Yale, careful never to let on to his loud, loutish, virginal cla.s.smates that while they got drunk and babbled of girls, he was practically a family man.

The affair had ended quietly, thanks to the width of the Atlantic Ocean as much as to that of pa.s.sing time. Blaise now looked into her face for the first time in a dozen years and found her the same but old. She was at least sixty-five. Since she had allowed her figure thoroughly to go, she was dressed like an odalisque in a sort of robe that did not try to reveal where her waist had been or even such details as the precise whereabouts of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s as they responded, as did all flesh, to inexorable gravity.

Anne met him in the foyer outside her drawing room, where twenty people were cheerily gathered. The house was shabbier than he remembered. The complaisant husband was long since dead, as was his friend, her son, swept away in the war. "We won't talk about him." Anne was firm. She held Blaise at arm's length so that her pale, far-sighted eyes might get a good look at him. "You've kept your figure."

"Yours ..."

"Say nothing, my love. I am retired. But you're still like-what did Caroline always call you?-a furious pony. My style-once. Now I no longer ride."

"Outside the battle?"

"Outside the war. We can't talk now. But come tomorrow, or any day at five. I want to know so much. I saw Caroline in that film. She photographs so well."

"You're one of the few who recognized her. She's thrilled to be both famous and unknown."

"Emma Traxler is a magic name in Paris this season. Tell me about Frederika. No, don't. Save that. The Jusserands are here. My fault. You obviously see them every day in Washington. But they want to see you. There are also old friends from our old life. I almost got M. Clemenceau. But he is saving himself for tomorrow."

For the first time in years, Blaise felt entirely at home: but then, for the first time in years, he was in a room filled with people he had known all his life and for whom nothing ever changed. Their ranks could be-indeed had been-decimated by war but they still continued to be what they had always been and everyone was in correct relation to everyone else. There was no one present, no matter how vigorous and young and even rebellious, who could not "place" everyone else and himself in a web of family and history. In Blaise's chosen land, only Boston was like this; but he was not a Bostonian. He was French because he had spent the first twenty years of his life in Paris and at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, and no one had forgotten him.

Blaise plunged into the warm bath; swam gracefully but swiftly through the Jusserands and those concerned with the Peace Conference, which now seemed a minor distraction. Here was the world, as they called it; of family, as they called it, of which he was forever, like it or not, a member.

"You know my mother." The young man looked literally familiar. Generation after generation, family resemblances could be, like b.u.t.terflies, identified by inherited markings, not to mention traits of character.

"I am the right age." Blaise did not even mind being taken for middle-aged when he was, moment by moment, becoming younger and more like his-what had Anne called him?-furious blond pony self. Blaise identified the young man, correctly, as a Polignac. He was then presented to a dark, rather plump young woman, whom he did not immediately place though the name was a famous one, Charlotte, born d.u.c.h.ess of Valentinois as she wore no wedding ring. Blaise was amused at the ease with which he could re-enter the abandoned world of youth. Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of an actress-with Negro blood, some said; Arab, said others-and the bachelor Prince Louis of Monaco, whose absence of issue had so alarmed his father, the reigning Prince of Monaco, that the girl had recently been legitimized and recognized as heiress to that convenient princ.i.p.ality by the sea. Pierre de Polignac was at the Foreign Office. "Though I won't be in attendance tomorrow. I am seriously outranked. But I hear that you will be present."

"How?" Blaise was surprised. There had been nothing in the press.

"We have a list at the Quai d'Orsay that no one is supposed to see so of course I saw it."

"Very sensible. I shall watch the opening, anyway."

"We've all enjoyed," said the actress's daughter, "your sister in Les Boches de l'Enfer."

"Everyone recognizes her here, and no one at home." Blaise was delighted.

"Actually, Figaro gave away the secret," said de Polignac. "We get no credit. How I long to go to America!"

Blaise spoke easily, without thinking, a princ.i.p.al pleasure in this society where, if one wanted to think, one could enjoy the most exhausting dialogue in the Henry Adams style; otherwise, conversation engulfed one warmly and the on-going narratives of each person in the world continued to unfold with sufficient surprises and odd turnings to keep boredom at bay.

Etienne de Beaumont was a spirited master of what Blaise liked to think of as the salon narrative. He was an elegant vivacious contemporary of Blaise, and they had known one another as boys. "Who would have thought you'd become an American!"

"Who would have thought that I was ever anything else?"

"I would." There was a mild excitement in the salon as the Queen of Naples made her entrance. She had lost her kingdom years before and now her brother-in-law, the Austrian emperor, was about to lose his empire to Woodrow Wilson's blue pencil. But the Queen was still as serenely beautiful as legend maintained, living a quiet life at Neuilly, undaunted by poverty. The ladies curtseyed low, as she pa.s.sed. The men bowed.

"I was influenced by your relative, the Beaumont who went with Tocqueville to America, and wrote the book ..."

"That Beaumont was a pa.s.sionate monarchist like me, though I lack the pa.s.sion. Anyway, Pierre de Polignac, who needs employment, is going to marry the Grimaldi girl, and become the prince consort of Monaco. After all, he has failed in literature. What else is there?"

"The Foreign Office?"

"He is only a decoration there."

"In Monaco?"

"A better-paid decoration. We have missed you. Are you going to open up Saint-Cloud?"

"It's not me but my house everyone misses."

"We are honest people. Oh, my G.o.d, the newlyweds." A middle-aged couple were moving purposefully in their direction, accompanied by a st.u.r.dy rather thick young woman of great vivacity and plainness.

Blaise recognized the man, who was a few years his senior; but neither woman was familiar. Apparently, it was the older of the two who had just been married to Louis de Talleyrand-Perigord, Duke of Montmorency.

"May I congratulate you?" Blaise shook hands formally with the groom, who seemed pleased to be remembered by their world's American now returned in triumph; the new d.u.c.h.ess appeared energetic, if plain, while the plump young woman was alive with vivacity. To Blaise's amazement, she was American.

"I've met you a hundred times, Mr. Sanford, but you wouldn't remember. I'm a friend of Elsie de Wolfe." Names, mostly sapphic, were set off like fireworks.