The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 24

"At last!" Emma was ecstatic. "I'm from Bryn Mawr. A letter. All of us. The June-second bombing. Trotsky-who else? Your anti-radical division. Superb. Wrote Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, the right person. In spite of-"

"Yes. It was pretty noisy, I'll say that. The explosion, I mean." But A. Mitch.e.l.l Palmer had no idea what Burden had unleashed upon him. Emma has finally found her tongue, Burden thought, as he moved away, greeting guests; unfortunately, her mind now moved too rapidly for her tongue to express so many urgencies.

Burden completed his tour of the party where he had started, on the porch. A fragment of a waxing moon decorated the black-purple sky and the last of the season's fireflies glided lazily on the west wind. From the grape arbor, two figures entwined, approached, unaware that he was watching. Tactfully, he stepped behind a column as Cissy Patterson, lipstick smeared, stepped onto the porch, followed now by the slightly dishevelled drunken Nick Longworth. They went inside. Burden was not surprised. Nick was a compulsive womanizer, made uninhibited by the drink, while Cissy was restless, to say the least. Then, as fate, or herself, would have it, Alice Longworth stepped onto the porch from the far door. She could not have avoided the sight of her husband and Cissy together.

"What a cool night, after such a hot day." Alice sat in a chair with her back to the party.

"I've always loved the park," said Burden, with rather more feeling than so neutral an observation deserved.

"I can't think of anything I love." Alice was grim. When she did not smile the Rooseveltian toothy smile, the thin lips made a pursed sombre line, while in the half-light her gray eyes were dull. "This is no place to live."

"In our line of work, we must."

"Your line. Nick's line. I have no line."

"Go away."

"Where? I always thought I'd live somewhere else when father was gone. But now that he's really gone, there is no place. I shall be a fixture, like one of those awful Apgars."

"My cousins."

"Poor you!" Alice leapt like a cat to her feet; self-pity quickly sloughed off. Kitty came out on the porch.

"Mr. Lansing wants to talk to you, Burden ..."

"I shall listen in," said Alice, "and report every word to Cabot. You know, when Wilson came back to the White House, I stood in the crowd on the sidewalk and I put a murrain on him, a very serious murrain ..."

Burden was now at the door.

"What is a murrain?" asked Kitty.

"A hex. A curse. I am a witch, you know."

"Can you see the future?" asked Burden.

"Of course," said Alice. "But I never look. I don't dare. Would you, if you could?"

"No," said Burden; and crossed to the corner where Lansing and Hitchc.o.c.k were waiting for him in the present that enveloped them all like the night with its half-moon and idle fireflies.

EIGHT.

1.

THE PRESIDENT WAS STANDING IN HIS OPEN CAR. Edith sat beside him, clutching flowers. The President held his hat in his left hand, and waved with his right. The smile looked genuine; fatigue, too. Then the car with its Secret Service outriders pulled into a street lined with working-cla.s.s people. As the President waved, they crossed their arms over their chests and looked away. Suddenly, one man held up a sign: "Release Political Prisoners." The President's hand dropped to his side. The smile vanished. Edith stared up at her husband, with a fixed awful smile, as the car, like a hea.r.s.e, made its way through the sombre crowd.

The lights came on in the screening room. "Where was that?" asked Caroline, appropriately shaken.

"Seattle." Tim waved to the projectionist. "That's all. Thanks." Together they left the screening room and walked down the musty-smelling hall to the offices that Famous Players-Lasky had rented Traxler Productions, overlooking the corner of Vine and Selma. Soon they would have to decide whether or not they would buy or build a studio, or continue to rent.

"You can't use that." Caroline was firm.

"If I knew how, I would. But there's no story to go with it." Tim stared down at the row of pepper trees that bordered Vine Street. The Lasky studio, as everyone called it, occupied two city blocks. On Vine Street was the studio, a two-storied gray frame building, while just back of it, on Argyle Street, was the fenced-in back lot, filled with technicians' sheds, New York streets, French villages, English mansions-every sort of setting that a photo-play might require.

Caroline studied a stack of photographs of herself. In the nick of time, for her at least, a cameraman had discovered that if black maline silk was placed over the camera lens years would be subtracted from those photographed, thus adding years to the acting lives of elderly players, of which Emma Traxler was one. Lines vanished or were reduced to mere platonic essences. At her worst, Emma simply looked faded but spiritual, and that was what the plot of The Dangerous Years called for: a widow with a fortune falls in love with her son's best friend at college, who wears knickerbockers to emphasize his youth. Although the actor was only a decade younger than Caroline, the new lens kept him a boy and Caroline a gamine in her late thirties. At the end, Caroline would commit suicide, something she very much looked forward to. Usually, she was to be seen at picture's end striding into the future during a long shot on a desolate moor, which was almost always the Burbank Golf Course after the mist-machine had disguised all the holes. Then a final close shot of her luminous face, transfigured, as Mr. Wurlitzer's organ played Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, and the women in the audience wept. Somehow, mysteriously and without design, Caroline Sanford had become Emma Traxler if not for good then for the amount of time that she chose to spend in Hollywood with Tim, and that looked to be most of the year.

Tim had recovered from the fiasco of The Strike-Breakers through the simple expedient of rewriting the t.i.tle cards to favor the railroad management and denounce the strikers. The result had been cheered in the popular press as a victory for capitalism; and no one had gone to see the movie. So, in the end, as Caroline observed, political integrity had been maintained.

"You've got to admit that that footage would make a swell ending to a story about the Wobblies. You know, the workers ignoring the President who had put so many of their leaders in jail."

"Why pick on poor Mr. Wilson?"

"Because he picked on poor Mr. Debs."

Caroline had made it a rule to ignore Tim's curious political line. "Philosophy" was too large a word to describe what seemed to her a perverse impulse to take the side of the unpopular and the weak. Since Americans only worshipped the strong and the bullying, she had at least convinced him that it was bad for his career to become too identified with the hated poor; yet, surprisingly, when she had suggested they make a film about Russia's October Revolution, he had not been interested. Plainly, he was more radical priest than revolutionary. She herself knew too much about politics to believe in anything other than the prevailing fact of force in human affairs. Henry Adams had been a thorough teacher.

When the secretary announced that Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times had materialized, Tim left the office by a back door. Miss Kingsley's section on entertainment in the Times was read by everyone in Hollywood, and much reprinted elsewhere. The world could not get enough news about the movies, and Miss Kingsley was the princ.i.p.al conduit between the studios and public. A maiden lady, she was startlingly unprurient. She was not interested in love affairs or scandals, only photo-plays planned or in production or in release.

"Dear Miss Traxler." Miss Kingsley withdrew a long glove from a mottled hand and Caroline, though preferring the glove, shook the hand warmly. "It's so nice having you here close to home. My heart sinks when I have to go over to Burbank or that ultima Thule, Universal City. I feel like a pioneer, so much cactus, so many onions, and the Cahuenga Pa.s.s terrifies me."

Miss Kingsley made herself comfortable in a chintz-covered chair. "I've just come from Mr. Griffith. Thanks to Mr. Lasky, he's got financing again and he'll be able to finish Scarlet Days, certain to be a monument, I predict, to the western, which, if memory serves, he's never made before, at feature length. He also tells me-this is between us, of course, as I won't write it yet-that he's going back to the East when he finishes his contract with Artcraft here. But then another little bird has told me that he's just signed a three-picture deal with First National, and that will keep him here, I should think, for at least another halcyon year."

"Is his studio for sale?" Caroline revered Mr. Griffith, as did everyone; but she was far more interested in the studio that he had created at the juncture of Hollywood and Sunset boulevards: two sound-stages, a house whose owner had been moved out, and a laboratory where it was possible not only to experiment with special effects but to create an entire movie from the printing of the negative to the editing to the making of copies for the distributors.

In Griffith's case, the entire process seldom took more than a month. Once he had decided on a story, he would get his artist in residence to draw each scene, which he then gave to the art director, who would call in the studio's carpenters, plasterers and painters, and the sets would be built. Meanwhile, Griffith would be rehearsing his actors; for years, he himself had been a stock-company actor, constantly on tour, and he had learned, firsthand, what thrilled the ma.s.s public. Then, in a great burst of energy, sometimes in as little as eighteen days, he would film the photo-play in an atmosphere very like a war, according to Tim, who had been involved as a cameraman in two of Griffith's early films. Although Griffith himself was relentlessly polite, he also enjoyed creating unease and tension all about him. Tim had learned what he could from him; and quickly moved on.

"I suspect ... I cannot be positive ... that he will sell once he's finished up his commitments here and removed himself to Mamaroneck in the East, Heaven only knows why."

"We would like to increase our production, as you know. Mr. Lasky has been very gracious, but we're crowded here. Mr. Farrell has found a place on Poverty Row ..."

Miss Kingsley shook her head and sighed. "No. No. Not for Traxler Productions. You are a hallmark of quality. Down the road there they make a movie in a week. Vulgar movies."

Caroline gazed out the window at Poverty Row, which was just visible on nearby Gower Street. The cheap studios resembled a row of barns or garages haphazardly a.s.sembled in what was still a large orange grove.

"We could build, I suppose."

"Do! Like Charlie Chaplin. Now there's a charming studio. How I enjoy going there! So English, with tea being served all the time, and of course it's where I like to think home is, this area, the true Hollywood and not the Valley or Culver City, in spite of dear Mr. Ince."

Chaplin's studio was on the east side of La Brea, below Santa Monica Boulevard, while two blocks west of La Brea, his fellow United Artist, Douglas Fairbanks, had built his studio. Here he would eventually be joined by Mary Pickford if she, a good Catholic, could ever get divorced from her alcoholic husband, a source of constant interest to the entire world if not to Caroline, who wanted nothing more than an inexpensive sound-stage of her own.

"You are," Miss Kinglsey had opened her notebook, "contemplating a film about the Bolshevik terror in Russia."

"How did you know that?" Caroline was always surprised at how much the vague Miss Kingsley knew about everything that had to do with "home," the true Hollywood.

"One of my little birds. Now, you know that those Warner Brothers people spent fifty thousand dollars to buy Amba.s.sador Gerard's book about Germany and the war, so there's now a serious trend, which I can detect, of doing real-life historical stories of a modern nature. Would you be working from a tome on the subject?"

Caroline was so thrilled to hear the word "tome" used in conversation that she said, without thinking, "Ah, yes. Yes! The tome will be Ten Days That Shook the World, if we can get the rights, of course."

Miss Kingsley's notebook nearly fell from her hand. "But that is a pro-Bolshevik tome, I am told."

"Oh, not the way we plan to do it."

"You will change the message the way you did in The Strike-Breakers?" Miss Kingsley was far from being the fool she seemed, and Caroline already regretted having spoken without a thought in her head.

"On that order, yes. Mr. Farrell is eager to alert all Americans to the dangers of communism, which is everywhere on the march. ..."

Miss Kingsley hummed happily to herself and wrote and wrote as Caroline improvised and improvised. Then Emma Traxler was questioned about her plans as an actress. Emma Traxler had made five films since Huns from h.e.l.l, and though each had made money none had equalled her startling debut. Even so, Caroline was amazed that she was something of a cult whom producers wanted to use. The previous year, Fairbanks had asked her to play Queen Berengaria to his Richard the Lion-hearted; and she had said yes, eagerly. But so far, there were no plans to make the film. "Everyone thinks I'm too contemporary for costume pictures," he had apologized when they last met in the Dining Room of the Stars at the Hollywood Hotel, where, surprisingly, a few stars occasionally dined.

"I have plans-hopes, I should say-to play Mary Stuart before I'm too old." Caroline enjoyed using the one word that Hollywood did not acknowledge.

"Dear, dear, dear," murmured Miss Kingsley, as if Caroline had confessed to some incurable disease. "No, no, no," she then added. "Never old. Will Mr. Farrell direct you?"

"I don't think that's his sort of thing. I'd like to use that young German director, Mr. Lubitsch."

"I saw his Madame Du Barry." Miss Kingsley looked stern. "It was very continental, if you know what I mean."

"But then so was Mary Stuart, and so," Caroline practiced a husky laugh like Bernhardt, "am I."

"You seem thoroughly American, Miss Traxler." After Miss Kingsley had bestowed her highest accolade, they discussed Caroline's current film, now in its second week of shooting. She was free today because the company was doing a garden-party scene to which her character had not been invited. Graciously, Miss Kingsley declined an invitation to visit the set.

Caroline then walked her to the main door of the studio, where, as always, a small crowd of innocent fans waited to see the stars come and go, not knowing what the less innocent fans knew, that the stars tended to enter from the Argyle Lot, a block away. Mr. Lasky himself greeted Miss Kingsley at the door, where a studio policeman stood guard. Lasky was a small plump cheerful gnome of a man. Of the Jewish producers, he was the only one to be born in the United States. Where his partner, Zukor, was imperious and harsh, Lasky was easy and charming, and it was only a matter of time, everyone agreed, before Lasky would be devoured by the great predator. Caroline studied the various movie magnates with all the fascinated zeal of an anthropologist.

"I've got Maurice Maeterlinck and Edward k.n.o.block and Somerset Maugham and Elinor Glyn." This was Lasky's greeting to Miss Kingsley, who responded with, "Hooray! When do they come?"

"January. I'm getting them all. You want one, Miss Traxler?"

"Yes. Bernard Shaw."

Lasky frowned. "He won't come. I guess he's holding out. But when he sees how we've gone and got every famous writer there is, he'll hightail it out here pretty fast, let me tell you."

Caroline left Mr. Lasky and Miss Kingsley together; and made her way through the building to the back lot, where the New York City row of brownstones always reminded her how much she would like to appear in Mrs. Wharton's The House of Mirth.

A film, was being shot in the street. Two gunmen came out of a shop, firing at the camera. Caroline ducked behind the street, where a metal frame held up the facades, which were so realistic that one could not tell they were not real. Thanks to San Francisco's 1915 Exposition, Hollywood had acquired a number of first-rate Italian plasterers, brought over to build fake Renaissance exhibit halls. At one point, Griffith had hired the lot of them to build Babylon for Intolerance, a set still to be seen, slightly peeling-all trumpeting elephants and fertility G.o.ddesses-at the confluence of Hollywood and Sunset boulevards.

Caroline's set was just beyond the New York street, a mansion with a lawn, surrounded by tall Eastern trees, which meant that the art department had transformed, most artfully, pepper trees into oaks.

Twenty ladies and gentlemen in fashionable attire drank tea while butlers circled them with trays of sandwiches. The director sat to the right of his cameraman, a homburg pulled over his brow. Directors prided themselves on the originality of their costumes. The star director at Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, dressed as if for polo. Others, usually from the theater, wore striped trousers and blazers suitable for a New York men's club. Emma's Oleg Olmstead was dressed for tennis except for a homburg to protect his head from the omnipresent sun. He waved to Caroline, who waved back and watched the scene, in which her film lover was made much of by the ingenue, a creature of a blondness undreamed of anywhere except Hollywood, where the perfecting-even the brutal re-creation-of nature was on a par with the best Italian plastering.

The scene would be observed by the stricken Emma Traxler in her luxurious bedroom overlooking the lawn-she had taken to her bed with what a script said was a cough but Emma decreed was a fever: the cameraman had enough trouble lighting her without having to deal with a face contorted by coughing. Once Emma's character realized that youth always calls to youth she, despite her wealth and high social position, would promptly take her own life, with a never-identified but swift-acting poison that caused her face, ever so gently, to relax into a final gentle smile.

When the scene ended, the extras were let go, and Mary Hulbert joined Caroline. Together the two women left the studio. "You don't know what this means to me, being able to work at anything, really." Mary had once been a pretty and vivacious woman whom life had so hara.s.sed that she was now distinctly wan and faded. A first husband, Mr. Hulbert, died; a second, Mr. Peck, had been divorced. A grown son was now living in New York City on what money she could give him.

A dozen years earlier, Mary had lived in a charming villa in Bermuda with her mother, and it was here that she had entertained the president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, when he used to take vacations on the island without his first wife. Caroline was certain that they had been lovers. Others thought not: after all, Wilson simply liked the company of women, particularly those who could recite poetry and talk, imaginatively, of him. For more than a decade, the two had exchanged letters, and the letters had figured in the last election. The Tribune had been offered copies. But Caroline had said no, on the ground that although they were affectionate they could hardly be called love letters. During that time, Caroline had met Mary and found her appealing. The letters themselves were a mystery in the sense that Caroline had no idea whether or not Mary herself was behind their sale. In any case, they did not affect the election and one of the President's wealthy admirers, Bernard Baruch, was supposed to have bought them all up.

The previous year, Mary had presented herself at Caroline's hotel in Los Angeles, and they fell upon one another as long-lost friends, largely because Caroline delighted in the mystery of a relationship that had never been a secret to anyone, including the first Mrs. Wilson, who, complaisantly, would invite Mary to the White House to entertain the President, unlike the second Mrs. Wilson, who was quite pleased that Mary had chosen to pursue her destiny in California as-variously and unsuccessfully-a rancher, a writer, an interior decorator and an actress. Caroline had got her acting work. She had also commissioned Mary to write a photo-play about Mary Queen of Scots.

Caroline enjoyed the luxury of driving herself in a black, open Graham-Paige-no more chauffeurs. As they drove through the Argyle gate, the fans shouted, "Emma! Emma!" and Emma smiled her haunting Madonna smile; and thought grimly of her dentist's threat to remove a left incisor, which would, a dozen actresses had blithely told her, cause the flesh beside the nostril to fall in, which meant an asymmetrical face for the screen unless the other incisor was also removed, in which case one might have a whole new and quite unwanted face.

There was little traffic in what was still, for Caroline, a village. She turned left on Vine into Hollywood Boulevard, a most suburban sort of street, with large houses set far back from the sidewalk. Above and parallel to Hollywood Boulevard was rustic Franklin Avenue, where many of the stars lived among wooded hills that were still wild: owls and coyotes and mockingbirds made clamorous the nights.

At Cahuenga and Hollywood there was a small cl.u.s.ter of shops, including the inevitable United Drug Company store, a bank, and a hardware shop. Behind the low shop fronts, on a ridge, was the de Longpre mansion, a twin-turretted Victorian house much admired by the locals. Caroline had been offered it by the owner, a painter, but she had said that she was far too shy to live in so conspicuous a house. As she was in her role as Emma Traxler, this was undoubtedly true. Other castles, usually the work of Chicago dentists or lawyers, had been equally unsuitable. She was now comfortably installed on the top floor of the Garden Court Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard just east of La Brea, from the Spanish word for "tar," a reminder of the famous La Brea tar pits where earlier residents of the planet could still be observed, embedded in life-enhancing oil.

Caroline parked on the Highland Avenue side of the Hollywood Hotel and thought, as she so often did, that Hollywood with its thirty thousand people had all the charms of village life and none of the drawbacks. Despite the constant attention of the world's press, it was possible to vanish into one's own house in the hills and be a part of dull wilderness, or one could step triumphantly onto the world's stage at the Hollywood or Alexandria Hotels. Fortunately, in the late afternoon, the world's stage, as represented by the hotel's south verandah, was not crowded and the solitary waiter brought them tea.

The automobiles that drove along Hollywood Boulevard usually slowed down to see who was going in or coming out or taking tea on the verandah. On good days, Caroline quite enjoyed being recognized. Today was good, were it not for the left incisor, which was now never far from her thoughts as she brooded on the nightmarish depression beside her nostril which could well sicken audiences as they gazed in horror at the terrible asymmetry of a once-perfect face. I am not really vain, she thought, eating a cuc.u.mber sandwich. I am simply mad, like everyone else here.

"What must it be like," asked Mary, "to be two people?"

"Isn't everyone? At least two, I'd say."

"Not so publicly, anyway. There you are one person on the screen, a woman of mystery ..."

"A secret without a sphinx?" Brightly Caroline contributed to her legend.

"And then you're the Mrs. Sanford, everyone knows."

"Only everyone in the District of Columbia, which is a long way away. I really love it here."

"I can see you do." Mary lit a cigarette. The hand, Caroline noted, was unsteady. "If I didn't have so much trouble ..." She stopped.

"Mary Stuart will solve that." Caroline had already given her an advance for the photo-play.

"You've been very good." Mary suddenly laughed, and Caroline had a glimpse of what charm she must have had in better times. "I've been very good, too. I haven't written a book."

"Perhaps," said Caroline Sanford, shoving the haunting Emma Traxler to one side, "you should. The Tribune would serialize."

"I will. One day. But I can't now. I must wait till he's ... off the scene."

"But no one will care by then."

"Oh, but he's permanently historic, don't you think?" A slender handsome young man with astonishingly even features greeted Caroline, who said, "How would you like to be Bothwell to my Mary Queen of Scots?"

"I hate horses," he said, simply. "Have you seen Mr. Griffith?"

Caroline said she had not.

"He's probably hiding out inside. We're having our premiere at last, Clune's Auditorium."

"I can never remember the t.i.tle."

"Busted Posies." The young man laughed. "I play a c.h.i.n.k." He went inside.