The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 44

Tim had come out on the terrace. He wore evening dress; and looked older than he was. "Do they do nothing here but talk politics?"

"The gentry talk horses-and blood lines. Theirs and the horses. My father talked about music," she added, wondering how that curious man had suddenly slipped back into her memory. "All Souls'," she said, in explanation to herself. "My father's spirit is abroad tonight. But I'd rather see my mother's."

"Your namesake."

"Partly. Emma de Traxler Schuyler d'Agrigente Sanford. It is too long for a marquee."

"What about for a life?"

"I don't think she thought so. But I don't know. I don't remember her."

From the lower terrace, a couple emerged from the darkness. Plainly, they had been at the pool house. "Young lovers," said Caroline tolerantly, holding up the lorgnette that was both a decoration and necessary to see with.

"Not so young," said Tim, whose far-sightedness complemented her myopia.

"Caroline," said Alice Longworth, with a bright smile. "What a lovely party. What a lovely place. What a lovely film star you are. Act for us."

"I am acting for you. I am smiling tolerantly, and recalling the fevers of my long-past youth. I am Marschallin at last."

Senator Borah found none of this amusing. He shook hands solemnly with Caroline and Tim. "We were looking over the place," he said. "I hadn't realized it was so big."

"The pool house is a great success," said Caroline. "It is All Souls' Night." She turned to Alice, handsome in blue and as happy as that restless creature could be.

"So it is. I think I've met them all by now. After all, everyone who's interesting is dead. We better go join them-in h.e.l.l, I suppose."

"You do. I'm going inside." The Lion of Idaho opened the French door and stepped into the crowded drawing room.

"Do you find maternity rewarding?" asked Alice.

"My daughter's here tonight," was Caroline's non-answer.

"I remember when you had her, years and years ago. Have I missed anything?"

"A great deal of trouble."

"I'm almost forty." In the half-light from the drawing room, Alice looked pale, like a phantom, a restless soul.

"Well, it does wonders for your skin. But then you have perfect skin. So you need not ... replicate."

"What a disgusting word," said Alice, and went inside.

"She's worried," Caroline observed.

"About getting pregnant? From Senator Walsh?"

"Borah. No. Oil. Her brothers Ted and Archie Roosevelt are involved with Mr. Sinclair. If he gets involved in the Teapot Dome hearings ... Why do I talk about these things when I'm out of it?"

Tim's face was half in shadow and so he half smiled at her. Through the French windows the guests could be seen, moving about in what looked to be some hieratic dance. "I think you're more in it now than you ever were before. That's if we pull it off."

Caroline had not made the connection, but, of course, he was right. "Because now we'll be acting in the first place instead of reacting, the way the press usually has to do. Here comes our transmitter."

Will Hays stepped out onto the terrace. The light back of him made his huge ears glow pink as they stood out from his neat rodentine head. "My two favorite producers," he said, with a show of proprietary warmth.

"And our preferred candidate for president." Caroline laid it on with her ancient skill, more Sanford than Traxler.

Hays held up a curved rodentine paw. "Now, now, that's quite a ways down the road if it's there at all." The ears shone like rubies. "Say, I like that first photo-play of yours a whole lot, what I read, anyway, not that I know much about these things. But it's got a lot of heart, sort of Booth Tarkington stuff, which I really like, you know, small town, family life, kid growing up, the whole thing's very truthful ..."

"Only," said Caroline, who could detect a demur in even the most enthusiastic panegyric.

"Only ... well, I was thinking about what you said about how everything that goes on in this town of yours will be like what's going on in the country, only you'll sort of point up maybe what's wrong or not quite right. So I was thinking about this really serious problem we've got now with drugs and how you just might show how dope can kill young people ..."

"Mr. Hays," it was Tim to the rescue, "the whole point to our sort of picture is not to melodramatize things. Drugs are a big problem in and around Hollywood Boulevard, but n.o.body would know where to find them in our town, and I don't think we should go and give the audience ideas."

Hays was still for a minute; then he nodded, "You've got a point there ..."

"Besides," said Caroline, "the boy's experience with cigarettes, where he gets sick, is exactly the same thing as drug-taking only it's more typical."

Hays dropped the subject. "I also liked your old newspaper editor. Why, I've known that sort of man all my life. Somebody who's always trying to do good but it's always uphill work."

Both Caroline and Tim laughed. The old newspaper editor, who managed, always, to be so smugly in the wrong on every subject, had been carefully based on a year's observation of Will Hays in action. Through the window closest, Caroline could see her daughter Emma, haranguing a terrified-looking senator.

"When do you folks release your first picture, the one I read?"

"January 1924," said Tim. "The first Sanford-Farrell Studio movie will open at the Strand in New York, New Year's Day. We're calling it Hometown."

"No more Traxler Productions?" Hays, like McAdoo before him, had taken mightily to the corporate end of movie-making.

"Emma Traxler died earlier this year," said Caroline, with quiet joy. "At Monte Carlo. She drank one gla.s.s of champagne too many and waltzed one time too often. She simply fell asleep and breathed her last, eyes shut."

"We'll sure miss her," said Hays, sincerely, as if of someone real. But then Emma Traxler had been very real to a great many people, including Caroline on certain mad days. "That's quite a big studio you're building yourselves out at Santa Monica."

Frederika was standing now in the doorway. "Everyone wants to talk to you, Mr. Hays, about Fatty Arbuckle. You must come in, and tell all."

"I hope they'll want to hear something more wholesome than that." Hays went inside. Frederika smiled at her sister-in-law. "Is it true that you two are getting married?"

"No," said Caroline. "It would give my daughter and Mr. Hays too much pleasure."

"Good. Then you need never divorce." Frederika returned to her party.

Caroline shivered. "All souls are chilly on their night out. Now I shall go get us some money for the studio." Before Tim could ask how, Caroline had gone inside.

Millicent Inverness, now Mrs. Daniel Truscott Carhart, greeted Caroline warmly. "I have given up drink," she said. "It is part of my new life."

"You look years younger," Caroline lied easily. Always punctilious, Millicent had waited until the Earl was safely dead before she remarried. Mr. Carhart was a dim New Englander connected in some way with the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, itself one of Washington's on-going mysteries that Caroline had never penetrated nor, indeed, tried to.

"I saw your daughter a moment ago. She appears to be divorced from that nice young man. I have some difficulty understanding her. She speaks so rapidly."

Emma had indeed been divorced. Now she was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, exposing those Communists who had managed to infiltrate the government. Mother and daughter met as seldom as possible. Emma refused to speak to Tim, on moral as well as political grounds. Emma had also found G.o.d and was a regular at ma.s.s, where Heloise encountered her, and got what news there was.

"She is trying to atone for her b.u.t.terfly mother," said Caroline. "She is serious. I am frivolous."

"Oh, no, you're not, honey," said Millicent Carhart, settling into her new Americanism and very much the niece of a folksy-but which one?-president.

Blaise was seated in the wood-panelled study where hung the portrait of Aaron Burr, Caroline's ancestor not Blaise's; yet he was a significant icon to each. Blaise was talking to the aged Trimble, who seldom went out anymore.

"Here we three are," said Caroline. "The Tribune made flesh."

"I'm shucking mine off pretty d.a.m.n soon," said Trimble glumly. "I hadn't realized that age was such a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned mess."

Caroline sat with her co-publishers. "Am I interrupting?"

Blaise shook his head. The handsome pony body had vanished beneath new flesh; he was definitely stout and the once-pale face was ruddy. He looked a clubman. She wondered about his private life. There must be someone; otherwise, he would not have accepted so easily Frederika's affair with Burden.

"It seems," said Blaise, "that last summer when our late President was in Kansas City, Mrs. Fall visited him secretly at the Muehlbach Hotel. No one knows what she told him but he was never the same again. Then, when he was in Alaska, he got a coded message from the White House, and this made him very agitated, according to Herbert Hoover, who was there. So he must have known a lot of what we're learning."

"Just known?" asked Caroline. "Or was he in on it?"

"The problem is how do you get all this to the public." Despite his age, Trimble never ceased to be an inquisitive editor. "Harding died one of the most popular presidents in history."

"The Senate hearings will change all that," said Blaise. "Forbes will go to jail. Fall, too. Maybe Daugherty, if half of what they say about him is true."

"Did he murder Jess Smith?" For Caroline, the Smith affair was the most intriguing of all.

"Daugherty was asleep in the White House when Smith was shot," said Trimble. "Of course, his deputy was with Smith in the apartment. Then Mr. Burns of the F.B.I. came upstairs and took the gun that killed him, and mislaid it, he says."

Frederika was at the door, splendid in white and gold. "Come out, you three. You do enough plotting at the office. The President's here." In the hallway, the small orchestra was playing "Hail to the Chief."

"Oh, G.o.d," said Blaise. The three stood up. "I'd rather spend an hour at the dentist than five minutes trying to talk to that man."

When Millicent Carhart had been placed next to the new President at dinner, she had said, "I've just made a ten-dollar bet that I can get you to say more than three words to me." The President had then turned his wizened-apple head toward her and, in his highly imitable Yankee voice, said, "You lose."

At the door to the library, Caroline pulled Blaise back. Trimble went on ahead into the hallway, where a crowd was gathering about the Coolidges.

"Do you still want to buy my share of the Tribune!"

Blaise gave her a long, curious look; then he nodded.

"Good. I'll tell my lawyer to talk to your lawyer. It will be like the old days."

"Why?"

"Why not? I've come to the end of this. That's all. Besides, I need the money for the Sanford-Farrell Studio."

"Are you really settling in out there?"

Caroline nodded. "After all, that's the only world there is now, what we invent."

"Invent or reflect?"

"What we invent others reflect, if we're ingenious enough, of course. Hearst showed us how to invent news, which we do, some of the time, for the best of reasons. But nothing we do ever goes very deep. We don't get into people's dreams, the way the movies do-or can do."

"The way you and Tim mean to do. Well, it must be very nice to be so ... creative."

"Are you envious?"

"Yes."

"I am pleased."

Then Blaise went into the hallway to greet the President, who was, like some white knight-in the press, at least-purifying the nation's political life just as Will Hays was doing the same for Hollywood, only Coolidge had no secret advisers and Hays, unknown to him, did.

Comfortably, Caroline, now entirely herself, one person at last, stared into the fire and thought of all the souls that she had known and if they were indeed abroad tonight, they would be all fire and air, light and shadow so fixed upon her memory that she might, if she chose, transfer them to strips of film that the whole world could then forever imagine until reel's end.

THE END.

About the Author.

GORE VIDAL wrote his first novel, Williwaw (1946), at the age of nineteen while overseas in World War II.

During four decades as a writer, Vidal has written novels, plays, short stories, and essays. He has also been a political activist. As a Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half century. From 1970 to 1972 he was co-chairman of the People's Party. In California's 1982 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, he polled a half million votes, and came in second in a field of nine.

In 1948 Vidal wrote the highly praised international bestseller The City and the Pillar. This was followed by The Judgment of Paris and the prophetic Messiah. In the fifties Vidal wrote plays for live television and films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the television plays became the successful Broadway play Visit to a Small Planet (1957). Directly for the theater he wrote the prize-winning hit The Best Man (1960).

In 1964 Vidal returned to the novel with Julian, the story of the apostate Roman emperor. This novel has been published in many languages and editions. As Henry de Montherlant wrote: "Julian is the only book about a Roman emperor that I like to re-read. Vidal loves his protagonist; he knows the period thoroughly; and the book is a beautiful hymn to the twilight of paganism." During the last quarter century Vidal has been telling the history of the United States as experienced by one family and its connections in what Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called "Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels or novelized histories." They are, in chronological order, Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.

During the same period, Vidal invented a series of satiric comedies-Myra Breckinridge, Myron, Kalki, Duluth-"Vidal's development ... along that line from Myra Breckinridge to Duluth is crowned with success," wrote Italo Calvino in La Repubblica (Rome). "I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube."

Vidal has also published several volumes of essays (most recently At Home). When the National Book Critics Circle presented him with an award (1982), the citation read: "The American tradition of independent and curious learning is kept alive in the wit and great expressiveness of Gore Vidal's criticism."