The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 35

"I am a softer president." Harding smiled. "As there's no chance of my ever being known as a great or brilliant president, like Wilson, I can only hope to be one of the better-loved, if any politician can ever be the beneficiary of such an emotion."

"Such a thing," said Borah, plainly impressed, "is very possible."

Harding patted each on the back and led them into the main hall. "Anyway, what I really have going for me is that since n.o.body has the slightest expectation of me, whatever I do that's any good at all will produce astonishment." Then Harding plunged into a crowd of tourists, shaking hands and visibly spreading euphoria.

As Burden and Borah waited for their car at the north portico, Burden said, "Offhand, I'd say that the Senate is not guiding the President, as previously advertised. Quite the contrary, in fact."

Borah grunted. "It's Hughes and Hoover that do the guiding."

"I'm not so sure."

"What difference does it make?" Borah got into the car first, though Burden was his senior. Burden got in after him. The car smelled of hyacinth, which the driver had picked somewhere-where?-the hyacinth in Rock Creek had come and gone. "As long as we're going in the same direction, everything's all right. It's later, when we differ ..." Borah's jaw set. He was made for opposition. He was eloquent, honest, intelligent; and he bored Burden to death.

3.

LIKE AN IMPERIOUS LIZARD, QUEEN ELIZABETH darted this way and that between the cardboard trees, which, despite superb-dim!-lighting, looked exactly like cardboard trees with paper leaves. Queen Elizabeth was very, very old and Mary Queen of Scots was simply old. Caroline sank lower in her chair, and watched herself unpack, one by one, her not very large bag of tricks. How few they were when all was said and done, and all appeared now to be said, done.

In the flickering light from the projection booth, she could see that Charles Eyton had not slumped in his seat; he sat very straight, smoking a cigarette whose smoke made cloudlike patterns in the ray of light that carried within its impulses the images of Traxler Productions' Mary Queen of Scots, starring Emma Traxler, a "troubled" production, as Miss Kingsley had called it in the Los Angeles Times, one whose budget had gone from one to close to two million dollars "with no young love interest for the flapper set," in the words of the Kine Weekly. Since Emma was the mature love interest, Taylor had, much to her relief, cut a subplot involving two young lovers. Now she longed to see dewy lips and unlined necks on the screen, anything other than her admittedly attractive ruff and somewhat less attractive tired eyes. Bothwell was the right age for her, which meant that they were both the wrong age for the movie audience as opposed to the theater, where, viewed at a distance, they would have charmed and convinced.

Caroline shut her eyes during the close shot where she turns on Queen Elizabeth in the cardboard forest. Despite careful lighting, the luminous eyes, beloved by adolescent boys and sapphic women of all ages, shone through a delicate network of very small lines never before visible in her mirror or, presumably, to the most expensive make-up man in the business. Now, like the ca.n.a.ls of Mars, they registered thirty times life size on the screen. Caroline was beginning to feel ill. She grasped William's hand, and found it sweaty. He returned the squeeze briefly; then detached his hand and lit a cigarette. There were a number of coughs from the rest of the audience, professionals who would soon be trying to market the long-awaited Mary.

A battle scene came as a relief. Then back to Mary's prison, and a great deal of marching up and down, and arms flung this way and that like a Dutch windmill in a gale. At last the ending: a jeering crowd of extras who looked as they always did in every other photo-play. It was said that movie addicts all over the country had memorized the faces of hundreds of extras and whenever a favorite appeared, he was cheered as he fought in the American or French Revolution or languidly gambled at the casino in Monte Carlo or pushed a cart in the slums of Old New York.

Finally: The great doors of the castle open and Mary appears alone, in black, clutching cross, Bible, rosary. She is regal in her bearing yet, somehow, vulnerable, as almost anyone would be whose head is about to be chopped off. Who did she remind Caroline of? Mary was at the foot of the steps to the scaffold when Caroline recalled-Miss Glover, the mathematics teacher at Mlle. Souvestre's, a woman with a never-ending cold, teary eyes and a dripping nose.

Caroline shuddered as she watched Miss Glover, clutching a much-used handkerchief, slowly ascend the steps to where the hooded headsman, ax in hand, awaits her. Wisely, Caroline had decided to keep her ruff on until the very last minute. William had suggested that she keep it on even while her head was being chopped off as no one would know the difference and, besides, an ax that could go clear through a neck could certainly take care of a mere ruff, but Caroline felt that history required a degree of respect.

Cut-away shots to the extras covered the removal of the ruff. Where before they were jeering, now they are suffused with both awe and pity, particularly a burly Highlander, who sports on one hairy wrist an expensive Longine wrist.w.a.tch. They would have to re-cut, thought Caroline. Tim would have seen that wrist.w.a.tch in time. Yet for this sort of thing William Desmond Taylor was the better director. But then again what, she wondered, panic beginning, was this sort of thing?

Mary Queen of Scots looks around her-one last luminous gaze upon a world that she is now about to leave forever. Then, ignoring k.n.o.block's interpolation of Anne Boleyn's "Such a little neck" ("Who on earth will know?" he had asked, "who said it?"), Mary-no, Miss Glover again-clutches Bible and cross to her bosom. A t.i.tle card a.s.sures the audience that she is en route to a better world where trigonometry is the study of triangles. Then Miss Glover-eternally in thrall to Trinity as the ultimate triangle-approaches the block; kneels; places head on block.

Pity and awe seize the extras just as it will the audience, depending on who is playing the Wurlitzer organ at New York's Strand theater or, if they are lucky enough to be booked into the Capitol, an entire symphony orchestra guaranteed to drag powerful emotions from any audience during those last moments as Miss Glover loses her head and the camera moves from the ax-man's knees to his hooded head to the tower of the castle behind to the stormy sky above where the sun emerges from behind a cloud bank to make a thousand prisms of the camera lens as Mary Queen of Scots' troubled soul is received by angels-gloria, gloria, gloria!

Caroline wanted to kill if not herself Emma Traxler, whose blind vanity had got her into this humiliating mess.

As the lights came on in the projection room, Charles Eyton rose and shook his head rapturously. "Never seen anything like it. Congratulations, both of you."

"It needs a bit of fine-tuning," said William smoothly. "We'll preview at Pasadena and see ... you know, how it holds."

Charles nodded and daubed at his eyes. "Take it to Bakersfield, too."

So it was as bad as Caroline suspected. Bakersfield meant a working-cla.s.s, meat-and-potatoes audience who would have hated Mary even more had it been good. The Bakersfield audience was also known to talk to the screen, advising the characters on their next plot-moves. Eyton was gone and Caroline accepted the congratulations of her fellow dream-makers. No eyes made contact with hers. She would go back to Washington.

Caroline dropped William off at his house. Although she wanted to talk to Tim, who was shooting a film in Culver City, William asked her to come in, rather more urgently than usual. Fortunately, Eddie was not visible. "Shall I make tea?" he asked.

Caroline said no, she would make herself a drink, which she did, from a console crowded with crystal decanters and silver-framed photographs of great stars, reverently arranged like Roman household deities. As in every other Hollywood house, Mary Pickford was princ.i.p.al G.o.ddess. Presumably when she got old and resembled Miss Glover, her picture would be removed from a thousand consoles and the tops of ten thousand pianos, and Gloria Swanson-or someone-would take her place. "Who is this?" For the first time Caroline noticed a picture of a striking if not beautiful woman with a large hat and huge dark eyes.

"Charlotte Shelby. You've met her. Little Mary Minter's mother."

"Little Mary Minter," murmured Caroline, staring at a large photograph of the golden-ringletted child with the large eyes and boiled-potato nose.

Then star faced director. "Bakersfield," said Caroline in a voice that she had never heard herself use before: Lady Macbeth was now within her range. She could do it on stage. The dialogue that she could never learn would be glued to the backs of chairs and columns, and she would thunder the part as she strode, covered with blood, about Glamis Castle or wherever it was in Scotland. No, not Scotland again. She had left all that was celluloid if not mortal of Emma Traxler on the Argyle-Scotland again!-Lot.

"I think, even in Bakersfield, they will be happy." William was comforting. "You're too close to it. That's all. I think the story works remarkably well."

"It does, William. I don't." Caroline sat down at his desk, as if it were her own. "The calendar has caught up with me."

"Don't be absurd." He said all that she wanted to hear.

"Do we open at the Capitol?"

William shrugged. "Why not? You're popular in that house. It's what they call cla.s.sy, and so are you. I'm leaving the first of June." William pressed his diaphragm. He had had for more than a year intermittent pains, as yet undiagnosed.

"Where to?" Caroline did not know whether or not she was being invited to go with him.

"London. I told you. k.n.o.block's lent me his townhouse in London. I'm leaving him this. A swap. I'll be back in the fall. I need a complete rest." He looked hara.s.sed. Although everyone thought that William Desmond Taylor took drugs, there was no sign of it in his behavior, unlike that of Mabel Normand or Wallace Reid, whom the studio supplied with morphine on the set so that he could cope with the day's shooting. Hollywood was growing more and more addicted and the salesmen of drugs-"dealers of cards," as they were sportily known-were everywhere, disguised as Russian princes at dinner parties or as peanut-vendors selling brown paper bags containing cards of cocaine. Caroline often had the sense that she was living in an encoded society to which she alone lacked the key.

"What about Green Temptation?" This was to be the next Taylor photo-play, with no part for Caroline.

"Postponed." He looked at her, somewhat anxiously. "Why don't you come, too?"

William had led Caroline so many times down the cactus-strewn path of unrequited desire that she was reluctant to expose herself again to a desert that contained neither honey nor locusts-or was it a mess of herbs? "I'm not sure that I can. The paper ..." She always mentioned her other life when the current one proved unsatisfactory.

"Of course," he said, too quickly. "I quite understand. I simply thought you might enjoy London and the theater and your European fame ..."

"In tatters, by now." As Caroline made light of herself and Europe and the movies, she played nervously with a letter on the desk. Over and over again she read to herself the line-black ink on blue notepaper: "I will shoot you and that is a promise." Yet so busy was she with her own performance that she did not take in the words. They were simply so many meaningless scrawls and loops, part of a different plot from the one that she was involved in, another keyless code. It was not until she had half-promised not to go, so much more tactical than a half-promise to go, that Caroline realized what she had been reading. But by then she was in bed with Tim for the first time in months. He had come home early from the studio. Heloise had let him in and he had fallen asleep in her bed. Caroline had seized her opportunity.

"What does he see in me?" she asked yet again: some of Tim's answers to this old question pleased her more than others.

"Money." Tim was brisk. He lay beside her, lean and hairy and self-absorbed.

"Why mine? There are so many other people here with more than I've got. He wants me to go to Europe with him. Why?"

"So that you'll introduce him to your grand friends."

"I don't have any. Anyway, he's got more. He already knows all the sort of people that-would know him," she added with precise cruelty.

"He still hasn't gone to bed with you?"

Caroline shook her head. "I a.s.sume that I'm too old. He who worships at the shrine of the Three M's will not light so much as a candle to my aged effigy."

"How you mock my religion!"

"Mine, too," said Caroline. She saw herself in a nun's habit, a vow of silence, doing good works in a leper colony. Then she remembered Lubitsch's comment that every actress over forty wanted to play a nun to hide her neck.

"Has it occurred to you that he's one of the boys?" Tim was always quick to separate everyone into one of two strict s.e.xual categories, which, Caroline knew, was not possible in the real world, at least not amongst Parisian ladies whose life work was to keep in perfect equilibrium husband, lover and beloved woman friend.

"Perhaps he is. Some of the time. But do boys write you letters in a woman's handwriting on scented note-paper, threatening to kill you?"

Tim sat up in bed. "Not my kind of boy."

"I shouldn't think anyone's kind of boy. No, the letter was from a woman. You can always tell. I don't know how. The color of the paper, the exclamation marks. ... Anyway, it was lying on his desk, and I was sitting at his desk. I didn't mean to read it but of course I did, right in front of him, too, not paying the slightest attention to what it said."

"Did it say 'kill'?"

" 'Shoot,' actually."

"Only a man would write 'shoot.' "

"Well, this woman wrote 'shoot.' "

Tim frowned. "Taylor's supposed to be pretty deep into the drug world. A fellow dealer, maybe?"

"I don't know. All I know is-I want to be with him." Precisely why Caroline would want to be at all hours of day and night in the company of a man with whom she had not had an affair was a mystery not only to the patient Tim but to herself. She had now lived quite a long time in the world and she had always managed through luck-bad or good?-or instinct to base her life securely upon herself and not upon others. From Burden to Tim, she had been able to conduct as pleasurable a relationship as she could with men while not allowing any of them into her life beyond, as it were, the bed. Now, bedless, again, as it were-how they had mocked Henry James's elaborate elderly style!-and how useful it was when it came to gathering up contradictory emotions in order to sort them out. Bedless, she was jealous in a way that she had never known before. She had, subtly she hoped, quizzed everyone about Taylor. She had flattered the Three dismal M's at parties, and she had responded warmly but wearily to Mabel Normand's charms, which were, like those of so many of the natural stars, calculated to ensnare both s.e.xes. But at the center of all this desire was William Desmond Taylor, a perfect enigma. He was liked by "real" men, even Chaplin was a friend, to the extent that that odd world-spirit could be said even to notice anyone in any guise save audience. The professionals regarded Taylor with admiration; and women were drawn to him. Yet she was quite unable to touch him, much less know him. Good manners-his-kept her from flinging herself upon him. Taylor was a master of distance, who always kept her just out of reach. Ordinarily, if frustrated, Caroline had known enough to move on. But this time she stayed on. He talked to her, constantly, of Mary and Mabel, and she listened, with sympathy, as if she were their mother.

"I don't think Mr. Eyton likes Mary Miles ... I mean, Mary Queen of Scots." Caroline put on her dressing gown.

"Do you like it?" Tim lay on the bed, wearing only a single garter which he had forgotten to take off.

"I look very old."

"Probably not as old as you think you do. Remember, you look at yourself a lot closer than the audience will. You over-react."

"I over-act."

"I would've stopped that."

"William tried." She was defensive of her pa.s.sion. "I suppose I suspected I looked wrong, like Miss Glover, a teacher I had in school. Perhaps," she looked into her dressing-table mirror, "I should bob my hair."

"Then you wouldn't look like Emma Traxler."

"That's the point."

"Forget it. Go to Europe with him. Get away from here for a while. Don't read the reviews. See your friend Mrs. Wharton and try to buy her new book, the one you like and I can't read. All those rich people ... you'll need long hair for that."

Tim cheered her up both physically and morally. It was curious that as she got older the act of love seemed more and more necessary to her than when she was young; yet morale tended to weaken with each new year, winged years, she thought of them, gliding by ever faster, like bats at sundown.

Caroline reciprocated, and they had an early dinner at the Sunset Inn on Ocean Avenue, where she tried to talk him out of a movie about a lynching in the South. "You're getting typed, as they call it," she said, watching an early near-full moon start its showy progress across the gray Pacific sky. Beneath them, the tide swept slowly in and out, swirling about the restaurant's fragile wooden piles set like stilts upon the sand. Across the dining room, eating heavily and drinking deeply, were a half-dozen comic actors, and their girl friends, known as starlets.

"There should be at least one ... typed director." But Tim did not look too pleased with his distinction. It was said that he had quarrelled with Ince. As there were not many other studios where he would have so free a hand, and as he had refused to allow Traxler Productions to be "typed," too, that left only Europe, which was not his sort of thing. "The poison-pen letters have stopped," he observed.

"My poor child," Caroline sighed.

"Emma now sends me poison-pen pamphlets. How did she get the way she is?"

"As she has no father, I suppose I'm at fault. But I don't know how."

"Washington?"

"Perhaps. It's hard for us-well, me-to believe that all those speeches our friends make in the Senate and we never listen to, they listen to ..."

"The public?"

Caroline nodded. "The senators who give them, too. They keep making so much of Bolshevism that, I suppose, they believe it all. Like the Huns."

"Just like the Huns." Tim looked up, and his eyes grew round. "Here she comes."

Caroline turned, as Elinor Glyn made her entrance, with three young men, of whom one was a rising star whose name Caroline could never remember.

Miss Glyn's eagle-like eye took in the entire restaurant. When she saw Caroline, she left her own party, swept past the table of comics who paused in their routines to gape with awe upon a legend. "Dear Miss Traxler!" Caroline and Tim both rose. "Do sit. Please. We're celebrating. I have just received what is called a 'go-ahead' for my second picture ..."

"Sit down," said Emma Traxler, all business, irony expunged at the thought of trade.

"I shall be making it near you, Mr. Farrell, in Culver City, with the charming Mr. Goldwyn, who has just told the press that my name is anonymous with s.e.x appeal. A bit of a revulsh, I suppose, but beggars cannot be choosers."

Caroline asked briskly for all details. "I produce," said Glyn. "Mr. Sam Wood directs for me yet again. He is aptly named but no matter. I shall have even greater freedom than I had with Lasky. There is a Mr. Gibbons in the art department who has actually seen a great house from the inside and is nearly a gentleman himself. No more dried palms and elephant feet in the drawing rooms of Mayfair ..."

"So unlike Sandringham and Osborne," said Caroline, playing the royal card.

"You have stayed in those houses?"

"In the old days of Queen Victoria." Caroline had once spent a weekend at Sandringham when the Prince of Wales, not the Queen, was in residence. There were, she recalled, a number of elephant feet containing canes and umbrellas. "But who plays the lead? Gloria Swanson again?"

"That is undecided. But I've got him! It, personified. Rudolph Valentino. He's joining us tonight with his two ladies. So charming. Do you speak Italian?"

"Oh, yes!" Caroline or, rather, Emma lied. In the last year, Valentino had become a world star with The Sheik and The Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse.

"Rodolfo is essentially unspoiled, untouched by the Californian Curse, as I call it. The Evil Fairy that spoils everything, finally, for everyone who comes here in pursuit of fool's gold ..."

"But the gold's actually pretty real," said Tim, somewhat recovered from his first alarm at the sight of Elinor Glyn.

"But then so are the fools." Caroline smiled radiantly, aware too that, as she did, her face had become a spider's web of lines and so, thanks to this suicidal-tic?-she should not be appearing opposite Rodolfo in Beyond the Rocks.

"A tale of innocence meeting sophistication. Of young fresh trusting Theodora ..."

If not the part of Theodora, then perhaps she could play her mother, thought Caroline wildly, allowing her smile to fade as quickly as was plausible.

"With Rodolfo as the world-weary Lord Bracondale ..."

Glyn gave her a suspicious look. "The Lambtons are a lot darker than adorable Rodolfo."

"Moors, they say-the Lambtons, that is. Wasn't Shakespeare's dark lady related to them?"

"That was before my time." Wig held high, Elinor Glyn joined her table. No mention had been made of Mary Queen of Scots.