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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A portrait of an age of both dazzling spirit and bitter disillusionment, based on the last drunken days of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The 1920s: a golden age, and Manley Halliday is a golden figure. Lauded by the critics, this great writer of the decade has everything - beauty, brilliance, wealth, and a strikingly lovely wife. But years later, in the very different atmosphere of the thirties, Halliday is a shadow of his former self, cast upon the inhospitable shores of Hollywood. When Shep, a young and ambitious Hollywood screenwriter, is partnered up with Halliday, he is awestruck to find himself working alongside a literary hero. Enlisted by movie mogul Victor Milgrim to co-write college musical Love on Ice, the pair embark on a journey to New York. But Shep may find that his vision of the great Manley Halliday fails to match up with the man himself . . .
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Seitenzahl: 697
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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The Disenchanted
BUDD SCHULBERG
For Arthur and Rosemary
‘The wondrous figure of that genius had long haunted me, and circumstances into which I needn’t here enter had within a few years contributed much to making it vivid … More interesting still than the man – for the dramatist at any rate – is the S.T. Coleridge type; so what I was to do was merely to recognise the type, to borrow it, to re-embody and freshly place it; an ideal under the law of which I could but cultivate a free hand. I proceeded to do so; I reconstructed the scene and the figures – I had my own idea, which required, to express itself, a new set of relations – though, when all is said, it had assuredly taken the recorded, transmitted person, the image embalmed in literary history, to fertilise my fancy … Therefore let us have here as little as possible about its “being” Mr This or Mrs That. If it adjusts itself with the least truth to its new life it can’t possibly be either …’
– HENRY JAMES; from his preface to The Lesson of the Master and Other Tales.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
by Anthony Burgess
I have known this novel since 1950, when it was first published in the United States, and I have read it probably once every two years, perhaps even oftener. This makes a total of about sixteen rereadings, and there are few other novels of which I can say this. Perhaps I ought to be ashamed of my partiality, since The Disenchanted is not generally considered to be as important as, say, The Sun Also Rises, which I have read some six times, and The Great Gatsby, which I have read only twice, though I saw the movie, the three movies rather. I have been longing for The Disenchanted to be filmed, and have heard periodically of attempts to raise money for its filming. Neither the Hemingway nor the Fitzgerald novel I have mentioned was adequately translated to the screen, but The Disenchanted is cinematic because it is about the cinema, and it has as hero a fine tragic figure whom any actor would give his eye-teeth to play. Next to The Last Tycoon, there is no other novel I know of which deals so authoritatively with the Hollywood of the nineteen-thirties. Budd Schulberg, who published part of his autobiography fairly recently, was born into the world of the cinema, and he tells us what it was like. His father was one of the great producers, successful but highly literate (only the film profession can admit that disjunction), and the young Budd knew the great actors as adoptive uncles and aunts. He also knew the techniques of the studios as a highly impressionable boy standing on the touchlines. He became an expert writer for the cinema himself: On The Waterfront and The Harder They Fall are his, to say nothing of A Face in the Crowd. But The Disenchanted has not yet achieved what could be regarded as a natural transition from print to celluloid, or whatever is used nowadays.
The Disenchanted is based, not too closely, on what happened to the author of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon when, sick though on remission from alcoholism, financially ruined because of his own past improvidence and the high hospital fees exacted for the very sick Zelda, he took work in Hollywood. Schulberg has not yet told us the biographical truth about the last days of Scott Fitzgerald as seen from his own youthful angle, and it is doubtful if he will ever need to. The fictional end of Manley Halliday in The Disenchanted is too fine a myth to be unscrambled into what is known as historical truth. Schulberg, like the Shep of his novel, was assigned to work with Scott Fitzgerald on a piece of kitsch called Love and Ice or something like it, and their collaboration was both tragic and farcical. It cried out for the mythicisation which The Disenchanted gives us, and the figure of Manley Halliday, both like and unlike Scott Fitzgerald, stands for more than a mere penniless writer past his best ruined by booze and admiration and the failure of his talent. He symbolises an epoch and a philosophy.
Young Shep is given his scenarial assignment while bombs are dropping on Barcelona. He is acutely conscious of the failure of American capitalism and the need for a left-wing regeneration of a doomed society. Like any decent young man, he is politically orientated in everything, though he works in a trade which purveys dreams. At the same time, there is something in his temperament which is drawn to the decadent pragmatism of the nineteen-twenties – an era which not only ended in a great depression but actively, in his view, caused it. The voice of the sybaritic twenties, jazz and bootleg liquor, fast cars, faster women, spendthrift extravagance, is Manley Halliday, who not only recorded the wasteful era but was, in real life, its most notorious representative. Jere, his wife, shiftless, talentless but pretentious, of immense sexual glamour, a wastrel and a destroyer, is contrasted with Shep’s own girlfriend, clean, decent, with the right political ideas and the hygienic prettiness of an epoch of earnest sobriety. The siren voice of the nineteen-twenties, conflicting with the reasonable admonitions of the age of disillusionment, is more seductive than Shep cares to admit. It is the seduction of the irrational, the Dionysian, and the dead and destructive epoch has, Shep hardly dares to admit, more glamour than the grammar of Marxism.
Ironically, the fulfilment of an impossible dream, the assignment to work with the writer he most admires, turns out for Shep to be the confirmation of the destructiveness of the age that writer wrote about. Halliday, long on the wagon, is seduced into drinking again by the decent Shep and his decent girlfriend, who decently want the assignment to be christened in a bottle of Mumm. Back on the booze, Halliday lets his atavistic streak take over. He is sick, unreliable, a grotesque tramp-figure, helpless, a hopeless collaborator, forcing the disgusted Shep into the postures of a nurse. And yet, of course, it is precisely as a nurse that Shep has wanted to see himself, though a nurse to the easy generality of a sick society, not an ageing man who is all too particular and palpable. It is easier for Shep to turn Halliday into the villain of a historical process, blaming him for the mess the world is in. He is very young, but as the story proceeds he becomes older. We leave him at the end with the manuscript of the novel that Halliday has been working on but is doomed now not to finish. Shep, glum but elated, sees how the art of the decadent reactionary Halliday renders all the fine talk about political rehabilitation meaningless. The particular is all that counts, and art is the scrupulous recording of the particular.
Schulberg himself does some scrupulous recording in this book, which is a triumph of double perspective. The author is writing in the era after World War Two and recalling what it was like to be living in the year of Munich. The young man living in the year of Munich yearns to know what it was like to live in the twenties. He does not find out, except through the refracting lens of his favourite novelist, but we find out through the quite remarkable imaginative penetration of the novelist who has created both the novelist and his admirer. True, Schulberg had the facts of Fitzgerald’s life to draw on, as well as the memoirs of an age that produced some of the most astonishing art of all time (though, by all the Marxist rules, it should have produced nothing). But the old stuff of the interludes that lace the narrative is convincing in a way that no mere research could render it. This is what it was like to live like Scott Fitzgerald, or Manley Halliday, and this is the veritable smell of the Paris and the Côte d’Azur of the age of the lost generation. The great Hollywood party given for ‘Strongpaws’ (the stand-in of Rin Tin Tin) is one of the most remarkable of the set pieces of modern fiction, and, with its apocalyptic end in the fire which regenerates the fallen Halliday, it is pure Hollywood-looking-at-Hollywood. But it is also literature.
Budd Schulberg has, for my money, not written enough. His other fiction is hard and rather rough American realism with a moralist, or even propagandist, tinge. The HarderThey Fall, which is about the racketeers of professional boxing, hits out in the manner of Upton Sinclair: it disgusts, makes the blood boil, asks us to do something about clearing up corruption. What Makes Sammy Run is a fascinated and fascinating study of American success in the film world: the talentless young Jew with plenty of push makes it where his betters fail. The volume of stories called A Face in the Crowd is best remembered for another success story – that of the hillbilly singer Lonesome Rhodes, who ends up as a political manipulator and very nearly turns into Big Brother – which became a fine film under the volume-title. These works, entertaining and powerful as they are, are not quite literature. There is little sense of the possibilities of language and imagery in them. By taking as his protagonist a master of language, Schulberg was forced into the development of a style which is sometimes distinguished and always assured. Scott Fitzgerald had, as The Crack-Up shows, the capacity to stand outside himself and make coldly elegant evaluations of a crumbling personality. He would have seen himself in The Disenchanted and approved of the way he is shown. No cruelty and no sentimentality, only hard and well-shaped exactitude.
The final test of a novelist’s achievement is how far he is able to modify the sensibility of his readers. He has certainly modified mine, who sees all ice carnivals as imitations of the climactic one presented here, and finds in many film producers the pretensions of Victor Milgrim (who used to be ‘an omnipotent reader’). Finally, the character of Manley Halliday, broken, tragi-comic but still devoted to art and art only, stands as a permanent symbol of the American writer, whose greatest enemy is early success. He is a three-dimensional creation who will haunt the imaginations of all who have the good fortune to be coming for the first time to this remarkable novel.
Anthony Burgess, 1983
CHAPTER ONE
It’s the waiting, Shep was thinking. You wait to get inside the gate, you wait outside the great man’s office, you wait for your agent to make the deal, you wait for the assignment, you wait for instructions on how to write what they want you to write, and then, when you finish your treatment and turn it in, you wait for that unique contribution to art, the story conference.
Older Hollywood writers knew how to get the most out of this three-or four-week lag. They caught up on their mail or did a little proselytising for the Guild or wrote an original against the rainy season or went in for matinees or worked out the bugs in their tennis game (with secretaries trained to page them promptly at the Club if the call should come).
Shep just waited. At first he had brought in a couple of books, Red Star Over China, Malraux’s Man’s Hope, but it was no use. Not with that phone at his elbow about to ring any moment. For over three weeks now Shep had arrived at his cubicle on the top floor of the Writers’ Building at nine-thirty and departed at six: 105 hours. He had kept track of them with the desperate patience of a prisoner in solitary – with nothing to do but await the verdict of Victor Milgrim, known on the lot as ‘The Czar of All the Rushes’.
Six months before, young Shep had come home to Hollywood from the hills of New England and the ivy-covered walls of Webster with a summa cum laude in English and the conviction that movies, as the great new folk art, needed young men with his combination of talent and ideals.
But nobody had been deceived. As his agent had explained, somewhat petulantly, ‘Look, kid, they won’t even make It Can’t Happen Here when they bought it already and that’s got a name behind it. So if you wanna put yourself in a selling position, go write yourself a hunk a pure entertainment.’
Shep had a girl he was interested in marrying and his old man had a studio car-rental business he was interested in avoiding. So, for the moment, he had knocked out a slick little trick called Love on Ice. It was not exactly what Professor Crofts had predicted for him when presenting him with the Senior Prize for Literary Composition, but it was, in Shep’s young and optimistic mind, that most convenient of apologetics: the means to an end.
Hired to develop his story for a brief trial period as a ‘junior writer’ (Shep found sardonic pleasure in his official title) at a sub-respectable hundred dollars a week, he had been encouraged when word filtered through to him that ‘the Boss is hot on the idea’ and wanted to know how rapidly Shep could ‘do a treatment’. Shep had received five calls from the front office in the last ten days to learn how soon Mr Milgrim could have it. He had staggered across the finish line at ten-thirty one Saturday night under pressure of a Red Arrow messenger who had arrived at seven to rush the scenario to Mr Milgrim in Palm Springs by motorcycle. Then this feverish tempo had abruptly slow-timed into three weeks without any reaction, three weeks of maddening silence. This was what old-timers had learnt to accept as they accepted the great man’s eccentric hours and his erratic outbursts of good taste.
Now another fruitless day had passed and Shep was on his way to the little self-operating elevator when he heard his phone ringing. One minute to six. Just time to meet his girl, grab a bite and go on to the rally for the Lincoln Brigade. That damn phone. Should he go back? It was just possible that it could be—
At last. Miss Dillon herself, the great man’s secretary. ‘Well, young man, congratulations. HE just mentioned your name. He wants you to …’
‘Don’t say it – stand by.’
‘Lucky you. He says he definitely wants to get with you tonight.’
‘Any idea what time I’ll get in?’
‘Oh. You naughty boy.’ It was Joe Penner now. Miss Dillon liked her conversations to brush lightly here and there the electrified fencing of sex. It was a form of corruption, Shep recognised, these little verbal sops to His secretary’s inclinations. ‘Now be a stout fella and stand by.’
So Shep was to keep himself available for a conference that might take place in ten minutes or ten hours. The best Milgrim could do was to promise ‘to work you in’ some time during office hours that always lasted until midnight and frequently extended until daybreak.
Shep felt a twinge of disgust at the sense of panic that fluttered in his stomach, the sense of impending crisis. He had pretended to laugh at the ‘option jitters’ that almost always seized the writers as they went into conference with the head man. Shep and his girl even had a phrase for it: ‘The final degradation of the artist.’ Children of depression, guided by hearsay knowledge of Marx and Freud, they were always having to sum things up and fit them neatly into cubby holes.
Now that word had come at last, Shep tried to fight down overanxiousness. He wanted Miss Dillon to hear the little shrug in his voice. ‘Okay, dig me at the pub across the street.’
At the kerb outside the studio entrance, Shep glanced at the headlines:
COWBOY ACTOR RUNS AMUCK
SMASH REDS IN BARCELONA
Another republic was going down in blood; the whole precarious structure of peaceful living was threatened now. Shep wondered at himself for clinging to Love on Ice, this flimsy raft that would float or sink at the word of a very big man in a rather small pond.
Uneasily, he entered ‘Stage One’, hangout for Hollywood’s version of the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the vital but anonymous cogs whose names never win mention in the celebrated columns, whose romances or indiscretions are never set forth between mischievous dots. These were assistant directors, cutters, bit players, second cameramen, sound men, juicers, grips, special-effects men, Hollywood’s exclusive proletariat, earning three to ten thousand a year, whose hands literally make pictures.
Shep had his usual Scotch with a finger of soda and listened idly to the chatter along the bar. It was all solid shop talk from technicians who could never quite relax from the pressure of their jobs, a blowing off of steam against superiors with whom they dared not publicly disagree. But here in the privacy of their own place, with two-drink confidence, it was:
—‘That lucky bastard, if he’s a director I’m Shirley Temple!’
—‘So I says, listen you bitch, I says, I don’t give a flop if you are Box Office Queen for 1938 – you’ll be Queen of my S-list if you don’t move your keester out of that dressing room and take your place for the next scene.’
—‘Three times I try to tell him about the mike shadow but the stubborn Lymie nipplehead just goes ahead and shoots it anyway.’
Shep looked up over the bar at that stock embellishment of all studio bistros, the collection of publicity stills autographed by stars present and past. Together on the top row were Phyllis Haver, Sue Carol and Sally O’Neill. He leant forward and squinted to make out the name of a fourth beauty with the bangs and spit-curls that were glamour in the twenties. Marie Astaire. The old names, the old styles in feminine lure never lost their fascination for Shep. At Hollywood High back in ’29 he had momentarily caught the coat-tails of an era. Like the college boys, some of whom already had given up these high jinks, he had waited impatiently for each new issue of College Humor and had felt the compulsion to inscribe those witty sayings of the period on his slicker, his cords and his second-hand Chevy. His first faint flush of adolescent desire had been aroused by Jacqueline Logan in The Bachelor Girl and Midnight Madness. Midnight Madness. Ah, there was a film to stir the blood of awakening high-school freshmen.
In the corner, quietly scoring Shep’s mood, an unobtrusive little man played a portable organ that the customers acknowledged only by raising their voices to drown it out. This instrument, like its musician, Lew Luria, had been salvaged from the silent days when the organ, accompanied by a soft violin, was indispensable for summoning from the actors the emotions demanded by the script and the director. If you bought Lew a drink he would tell you how he used to get Clara Bow ready for her crying scenes by playing ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’. But just as Lew’s real profession had died with silent pictures, so had his repertoire. His favourites were ‘Mary Lou’ and ‘Avalon Town’. When he wanted to play something more up to date, it was usually ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’ or ‘Broadway Melody’.
Shep had another drink and went to call his girl, working late at another studio farther up the boulevard. ‘Damn it, Shep’ (never darling or sweetheart or honey because she said the movies had worn the shine off the sweet words), ‘I’ll be a little late, at three o’clock, a whole stinking magazine novel to read and synopsise – of course they had to have it tonight, wouldn’t you know? – Faith Baldwin – Four Daughters all over again without the Epstein dialogue – God, I hate women writers – Parker and Hellman of course, they don’t count, they’re just writers – won’t it be awful when my grandchildren ask me what I was doing the day Barcelona fell and I have to say I was synopsising Faith Baldwin!’
All of this took less time to say than most people would need for Hello, how are you. She talked her own kind of shorthand. There was never quite enough time to fit in all the different ideas.
Snap judgements, damning criticisms, whopping generalisations were part of her charm, signs of the form youthful vitality had taken in a year when crisis was everybody’s breakfast food.
‘Listen, Sara, I can’t make it at all. Milgrim called. I’ve got to stand by.’
‘Hooray. You mean he’s actually read it?’
‘I suppose so. But Christ knows what time he’ll see me. Let’s just hope he likes it.’
‘Now don’t be a worrier. Milgrim will love it. Why shouldn’t he? He’s made the same story at least twice before.’
‘Nice talk,’ Shep said, half aware of the increasing influence of the studio idiom. ‘Think I’ll trade you in for a woman who looks up to me.’
‘That’d be dull,’ she said. ‘Gotta go now. Faith Baldwin’s leaning over my shoulder. Call me after you’ve had your audience, no matter how late.’
Shep wandered back to the bar. He sent a highball over to Lew Luria and Lew played some old Rodgers and Hart things he had always admired: ‘I took one look at you …’
There was a call for Shep from Milgrim’s office. He showed his youth in his effort at nonchalance.
‘The Great White Father is looking at rushes now.’
He smiled at Miss Dillon’s familiar mockery. There was always that air of amused boredom in her voice from having to white-lie and alibi and brush off so many suitors for Milgrim’s attention.
‘Peggy, I’m pining for you. How long would you say it’ll be?’
Studio life prescribed set patterns of behaviour. Stylised flirtation was the rule of the game. Miss Dillon was so accustomed to flattery and elaborate sweet talk that she would think she were being insulted if addressed with ordinary courtesy.
‘Shep, for you, darling, I’ll try my best to get you in by 10.30.’
‘I love you,’ he said automatically, as, six months ago, he would have said ‘Thanks.’
At the bar familiar faces were saying familiar things. ‘So I said … I went right up and told him … I’m the kind of person who …’ The atmosphere vibrated with the first person singular. Egos, like corks submerged by studio routine and held down by stronger personalities, were bobbing up all over the place now that the pressure had been removed.
Half an hour later Miss Dillon was on the phone again.
‘Can you stand a small shock, darling? The boss-man has just started running Hurricane. He wants to make sure his sand storm is bigger, louder and more destructive than the Goldwyn blow. So stand by, honey-chile.’
‘My God, he’s going to run the whole thing? Couldn’t he just see the last reel?’
‘You know my Boss. Celluloid-happy. He just loves to watch them moom-pitchurs … Hello, are you there old boy?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I just sighed.’
‘Want me to send you over some bennies?’
‘Had two already. I’m vibrating like a hopped-up Ford.’
‘Relax, relax. Who’s Victor Milgrim? What’s he got that God ain’t got except three Academy Awards?’
‘May the Lord – I mean Milgrim – bless you, Peggy. You’re God’s gift to a persecuted minority – the junior writer.’
‘Pul-lease,’ Miss Dillon hammed it. ‘Do not take the name of my Boss in vain.’
Peggy Dillon was a good kid, Shep conceded. Just too many late nights, too many benzedrines and too many witty or would-be witty gentleman callers who practised their art of seduction on her to sharpen their technique for their real quarry, Victor Milgrim.
This time the bartender, who picked up bit parts in pictures, said ‘What can I do you for?’ It made Shep conscious of how much Hollywood talk fell into familiar speech patterns. It disturbed him when he caught the Hollywoodisms in his own speech. ‘How do you LIKE that?’ ‘Good – it’s but terrific!’ The social and financial extravagance was reflected in verbal extravagance. People were forever calling pictures sensational that were just all right; men called each other honey and sweetheart when they weren’t lovers or even friends. It’s a world fenced in with exclamation points, Shep thought, a world where hyperbole is the mother tongue.
We haven’t made men out of celluloid, we screenwriters – we’ve made celluloid out of men. We’re both Prometheus and the vulture who feeds on his liver.
Shep was indulging a young man’s dream of rescuing this captive giant when the phone called him back once more to studio reality.
‘Shep darling, I hope you’re in an awfully good mood.’
It was a little late in the evening for Miss Dillon’s whimsies but Shep played along. ‘You mean … as they say in the movies.’
‘The boss-man was just about to have me buzz you when Yvonne Darré called. Seems she’s all in a tizzy over the Empress Eugenie script and she can’t get her beauty sleep until she comes down and cries on his shoulder. My poor boss. Sometimes I almost feel sorry for him.’
‘I feel a helluva lot sorrier for me. When do I get in? Some time in July, 1945?’
‘Just stand by, Buster. He’ll probably get to you around midnight.’
‘A junior writer,’ Shep said, ‘is such a low form of animal life that it reproduces by mitosis.’
‘I don’t know what that means but I doubt if you could get it by the Hays Office.’
‘Mitosis, my dear Miss Dillon, is the least pleasurable method of reproducing oneself. You just swell up and split in two.’
‘Is that what you learn in college?’
‘You learn all kinds of reproductive methods in college.’
‘You go right home and wash your mind out with soap.’
‘Suppose I try Scotch?’ he said.
Taking his place at the bar, he drank strategically, trying to reach just that right peak of confidence without sliding down the other side into self-delusion. The waiting, his mind groaned, the interminable waiting. He sent another drink over to Lew Luria and the little, almost-forgotten man smiled formally and began to play ‘Sweeter Than Sweet’.
Shep was chasing his Scotch with coffee to keep awake when, a little before one, just seven hours after the initial call, Miss Dillon phoned him to hurry over.
CHAPTER TWO
Shep had been in the Victor Milgrim office only twice before, for two minutes of routine charm when he was first hired, and for a ten-minute monologue by Milgrim on his ideas for developing Love on Ice when Shep was assigned to screenplay. The proportions of the room met the generous standards of Hollywood’s inner circle, but Victor Milgrim had proud confidence in the superiority of taste that marked his furnishings. It was all authentic Chippendale personally purchased for Mr Milgrim by Lord Ronald Acworth, World-Wide’s British representative. As in his film productions and his racing stable, Milgrim had demanded the very best. Not even previously imported Chippendale would satisfy him, lest he should be inadvertently duped by reproduction. The possibility that a copy could be rung in on him from the British Isles did not suggest itself to him. Although his knowledge of England was limited to a few ceremonial tours, Milgrim had an abiding, almost mystical devotion to the Empire. Several people had seen him cry unabashedly, even ostentatiously, at Edward’s abdication speech.
The mellowed mahogany was set off by rich wine-red carpeting, eighteenth-century brass and royal-blue draperies selected by one of Hollywood’s more discriminating decorators, Fanny Brice. One entire wall was lined with books in fine leather bindings, mostly sets, Shakespeare, Thackeray, Hardy, Galsworthy, Kipling, Shaw, with a few of the American bestsellers that had inspired Milgrim films. One of the sets elegantly bound in full morocco consisted of all the scenarios of Milgrim productions, some thirty-seven of them, all with the name of Victor Milgrim stamped across the backbone, the embossed gold letters seeming to add the name of Milgrim to the immortals among whom it stood. On the walls behind the great mahogany desk were handsomely framed 11" x 16" autographed photographs of President Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Ambassador Kennedy, the Duke of Windsor, Bernard Baruch, Winston Churchill, James B. Conant, Thomas Lamont and Governor Merriam of California. Mussolini, on whom Milgrim had made an official call in 1935 when his film Moll Flanders had won the Italian cinema award, had recently been removed. Now that Merriam had at last gone down in defeat to make way for the candidate who inherited the following of Upton Sinclair, the big bald head with the dull political face would probably be removed too. Milgrim was nominally a Republican, just as he was nominally a monogamist, but his first loyalty was to success, contemporaneous success. Even last week’s would not do. Having fought his way up from borderline illiteracy to the point where he could discuss literature with Somerset Maugham in an accent that had more in common with Maugham than with his childhood neighbours, it was only natural that he should identify himself with and cultivate the main line of prestige. Archbishop Cantwell, Henry Luce, young Vittorio Mussolini, fresh from aerial triumphs over naked Abyssinians, whoever held, for almost any reason at all, positions of prominence, were honoured guests of the studio.
The wide expanse of the Milgrim desk supported hundreds of items, pieces in an endless game played between Milgrim and Miss Dillon. He was always snatching things up and laying them down on the wrong pile; she was forever rearranging so that the huge desk should not appear cluttered. At the moment Miss Dillon had gained the upper hand. In fifteen or twenty neat piles were scenarios to read; multiple notepads to catch the happier results of ‘thinking out loud’; the schedule of appointments for the week, professional, social and the large category in which these intermingled; regret-letters to sign, letters to schools and institutions, flattering letters to people who in large ways or small could be of service to World-Wide Productions; a letter to an old friend refusing a loan of five thousand dollars; a cheque for $7,800 lost to Val Steffany, the agent, at the last Saturday-night poker game; several advertising layouts for Desired from which he was to pick the one he liked best; the stills of a dozen undiscovered ingénues from whose ranks Milgrim hoped to select the ideal Heather for his next five-million-dollar epic; the evening papers with those parts marked by Miss Miller that would be of special interest to him (Miss Miller, waiting for her chance to be promoted to assistant producer, even red-pencilled story possibilities in topics of the day).
On one corner of the desk was a framed title page of the scenario of his first triumph, Orphans of the Night, autographed by the entire company. The director of Orphans was a charity case at the Motion Picture Relief Home now and the female star, Betty Grant (about whom people would say occasionally now Whatever happened to Betty Grant?), had just been told by Miss Dillon that Mr Milgrim was engaged in finishing one picture and planning another and could not say when he would be free to give her an appointment. On the other corner of the desk was a colour photograph of a creamy full-length Alexander Brook painting of Mrs Milgrim, the former English beauty Maud Leslie, painted some years ago, though not so many as the glossy youthfulness of the face would indicate. Milgrim was tilted back in his chair with his hands to his eyes in a gesture of weariness when Shep approached.
‘Hello, Shep,’ he said (last time it had been ‘Stearns’), rising to extend a limp hand that had been for too many hours making notes, turning synopsis pages, picking up phones, shaking other hands and emphasising decisions or suggesting emotional nuances. Who’s Who had Milgrim down for not quite forty, though his hair was thinning rapidly and what remained had long been prematurely grey. He was not a handsome man but he dressed in such excellent taste and had such an abundance of personal magnetism that he would have been immensely attractive to women even without the glamour of his office.
‘How about a cup of coffee?’ He buzzed for Miss Dillon. ‘My doctor tells me to cut out coffee, but how the hell can I stand this grind if I don’t take something to keep me going?’
He smiled the smile that melted hard-trading agents and headstrong directors, softened bitchy stars, warmed cynical playwrights, and charmed beautiful women.
Shep just sat there waiting. There was nothing to say. Milgrim had seemed to make it clear that he did not really consider this a two-way conversation between equals. Milgrim was being the good guy, the rare creature of success who manages to remain a regular fellow, who somehow achieves high office without the usual medieval manoeuvring. Shep was conscious of admiring a performance rather than responding to his appeal. He merely wondered when Milgrim would work the conversation around to Love on Ice. He wished he could come right out, lay it on the line, Well, Milgrim, am I in or out?
Milgrim sipped his coffee slowly, and Shep could see that he even drew satisfaction from these periods of let-down, as the cross-country runner measures his achievements by the muscle aches and the painful breathing. ‘The trouble with me, Shep,’ Milgrim began a confession the young man was sure he had recited many times before, ‘is that I put too much of myself into every picture. Too many details, too many responsibilities, it’s what killed Thalberg. But I’m not just trying to make another Box Office Champion. I’ve got to make sure every picture with my name on it—’
‘Five or six times,’ Shep thought irreverently.
‘—has the Milgrim feel to it.’
‘Playboy was a marvellous job,’ Shep put in for punctuation. ‘I honestly didn’t think you could change so much of what Synge wrote and still come so close to the original flavour.’
Shep heard himself say this as if he were sitting on his own lap, both dummy and ventriloquist. Why, he wondered, are we left no area between outright rebellion and grovelling sycophancy?
‘I dreamt of doing Playboy ever since I saw the Abbey Players do it on Broadway when I was only an assistant producer.’ Milgrim rewarded Shep with another smile for having introduced one of his favourite subjects. ‘I knew I could lick it, even if it did take me twenty-three writers, and I wound up having to write most of it myself. You don’t make pictures like Playboy for money. No, that was a labour of love, just like I Die But Once.’ Die was last year’s historical fiction bonanza, which had just been released. ‘Naturally I’m not in business to lose money. But something Irving told me when I was a kid I’ve never forgotten’ – the voice lowered in reverence as the local saint was invoked – ‘“Pictures are more than a great business, Victor. They’re a social responsibility.”’
While Milgrim paused dramatically, Shep tried to imagine what possible connection there could be between social responsibility and Love on Ice.
Love on Ice seemed to be completely sidetracked in the teeming depot of the Milgrim mind. ‘Shep, the trouble with this business is that there’s too many people in it who have no real loyalty to it. All they’re doing is selling their minds to the highest bidder. They have the same sort of contempt for pictures that whores have for the act of two-dollar passion. They just don’t have the foresight to see that our medium is going to begin where the other arts leave off.’
Like all first-line salesmen, Milgrim was his own best customer. The coffee and the benzedrine, brewed together on the inextinguishable blue flame of his ego, were producing a characteristic regeneration. Throwing off the weight of fourteen hectic hours in this office, he rose from his chair and began his famous pacing. Although Shep knew he was saying whatever came into his head, his words had the timbre of brilliance. Since the death of Thalberg, so many people had turned to him in their need for a substitute genius that he had answered the call.
‘Twenty years from now, if we can keep improving our product as much as we have since the war, the Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, the Wolfes and the Hallidays will start out as screenplay writers instead of novelists. Wait and see if I’m not right, Shep. The great American writing of the future will be done directly for the screen.’
Shep, waiting for Milgrim to come to the point, wondered how much this heady alchemist knew about ‘the great American writing’. It was studio-writer talk that the only form of writing with which Milgrim was acquainted was the synopsis. Perhaps his knowledge of modern American literature had come to him in that same easy-to-swallow capsule form. But he had the chameleon talent for taking on the intellectual colouration of whatever idea he happened to fasten on to. An accomplished rustler of the mind, he could sneak into other people’s intellectual pastures, ride herd on their ideas and quickly brand and market them as his own.
‘The Sun Also Rises reads like a screenplay …’ Milgrim had this bone in his mouth, Shep conceded. But where was he running with it? ‘Almost all dialogue, dramatic climaxes, description stripped to bare essentials. And Farewell to Arms – that was pure pictures. And wasn’t Fitzgerald writing movies when he had Gatsby staring across the Sound to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock? And look at Halliday – God knows he wrote like an angel – you could never get on film the marvellous style, but the characters, the scenes – the party in the Nogent hospital in Friends and Foes, and that drunken ticker-tape dream in The Night’s High Noon. I’d make that in a flash – if I could only lick the Hays Office angle …’
Only Shep’s outer ear was listening to Milgrim now. Withdrawing from this room, from the self-hypnotic music of the Milgrim profundities, from the momentary anxieties of his own film career, he was with his own thoughts of Manley Halliday. That assignment in American Lit – The Night’s High Noon. He had taken it back to the dorm to skim through for a quiz next day, found himself reading and marvelling at every line, and had hurried to the library as soon as it was open to get more of Halliday.
Whenever Shep thought about the twenties after that – and he thought about them often, drawn toward them with an incomprehensible nostalgia for a world he never knew – he was really thinking about The Night’s High Noon, Friends and Foes, The Light Fantastic and even the lesser novels and short-story and essay collections.
As a child of his time, Shep belonged with the school of social significance, but at odd moments, like the clandestine cigarette smokers behind the schoolyard wall, he would sneak off to his admiration for Halliday, the grace of the prose, the interest in people rather than programmes, manners rather than class doctrine.
‘By the way, have you ever read Halliday?’ Milgrim was asking. ‘Do you like his stuff?’
For a moment Shep just looked at him. ‘Do I like his stuff? I think he was up there with the best we had.’
The Milgrim smile was a little smug and possessive. He always smiled for things he had or for impressions he wished to make.
‘Think you’d like to work with Halliday?’
‘Work with Halliday! Are you kidding? He’s dead, isn’t he?’
Milgrim looked at the young man and smiled the smile of superior knowledge. ‘He’s in the next room reading your script.’
The rest of what Milgrim said was lost on Shep. Manley Halliday in the next room. (Manley Halliday in the next room.)
‘If he likes the set-up he’s going to work on it. I thought I’d keep you on with him. The scene is your college, so you should be able to help out a good deal with the background. And I’d like you to check over his dialogue. Probably a lot of new expressions you can drop in to make the kids sound right. Like this word meatball you use, and wet. Manley’ (the chilling effect of this casual use of the great name drew Shep back to the conversation) ‘may be a little out of date. Come on in and meet him.’
For the second time that day Shep felt himself going through the motions of simulated casualness. Shaken, mystified, he followed Milgrim through the doorway.
CHAPTER THREE
Manley Halliday was reading the scenario when Shep entered. He did not look up until they came halfway across the room to him, and when he did Shep saw an old young face with ashen complexion. Could this be Manley Halliday?
Halliday lifted himself out of the deep red leather chair with stiff good manners. Shep was surprised to see that the author was several inches shorter than the image in his mind, not much over five six, a slender, delicately made man with the beginning of a small paunch.
‘Glad to meet you, sir,’ Shep heard him say under his breath. But the soft hand hurriedly withdrawn, the disinterested flick of the eyes drew the meaning of the words.
Shep’s own response embarrassed him even though he was helpless to temper it. ‘It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Halliday.’
‘Manley, it turns out he’s one of your fans,’ Milgrim said with a laugh.
Shep felt he was being offered up to Manley Halliday. He wished Milgrim had waited for him to tell Halliday in his own way.
Halliday acknowledged the compliment with an almost imperceptible bow and the faintest suggestion of a smile, reflecting disbelief rather than pleasure.
‘Manley, I thought I’d keep young Stearns on to collaborate with you – if that’s all right with you, of course …’
Shep had never seen Milgrim hide his own positiveness under so much deference. Even the way he said Manley seemed to imply not a casual familiarity but a respectful request for permission to call him Manley. The first time Shep heard it, he thought Milgrim had gone out of character. But then he realised that Manley Halliday was a celebrity from another world, to be admired like Baruch and Lamont and Einstein. Crawford and Hitchcock and Cary Grant were the everyday commodities of Milgrim’s world. But Manley Halliday, even ten years late, even on the skids, was a self-made businessman-artist’s ideal of eloquence, of literacy raised to the level of Pulitzer Prizes and Modern Library editions.
Manley Halliday’s collaborator. When Milgrim made the suggestion, Shep tried to meet the author’s eyes and smile to signal his realisation of the preposterousness of the idea. But Halliday was polite, in that mannered way associated with capes and walking sticks, in that way which leaves one totally incapable of perceiving the intention behind the social mask.
‘I haven’t collaborated with anybody since – Lord, since my room-mate and I wrote the Hasty Pudding show of ’15.’
He paused, and then added, with what Shep feared was reluctance, ‘But I’ll be glad to try it with Mr Stearns.’
Shep noticed for the first time how Halliday talked. The words came up out of a face that paid no attention to them. Only what had to be said was said. It was said nicely, with a care for amenities, yet accompanied by the unspoken hope that what had just been said would suffice.
In a delayed take – as Milgrim would have said – the producer seemed to realise the incongruity of teaming Halliday with young Stearns, for he hastened to explain, ‘You may find writing for the movies a little different from your novels, Manley. Most of our writers, even some of the big playwrights, find it easier to have someone for a sounding board.’ Sensitive to the possible effect of this on Shep’s morale, Milgrim added, ‘And then if there’s anything I don’t like I can always blame young Stearns here.’
Milgrim placed his hand on Shep’s shoulder and squeezed it gently to emphasise the good nature of the little joke. But Shep was still too overcome at finding a dead god transformed into a live colleague to care whether he was called collaborator, copy boy or male stenographer. He had even forgotten to worry about the suspended sentence his script apparently had received. All he could think of just then was that he was to have an opportunity to know Manley Halliday, talk to him about his work and discuss the twenties toward which he felt this incomprehensible nostalgia.
‘Well, if everything’s all right with you, Manley, I’ll leave you two geniuses to work out how you want to get started,’ Milgrim said, cheerfully managing to pay homage to Halliday on one knee while having his fun at Shep’s expense with the other. ‘Manley, we’d like you to come for dinner soon. Maud will call you. And by the way she’s dying to have you autograph your books for her. She’s a great collector of autographed books. And she’s always said you and Louie Bromfield are her favourite American authors.’
Halliday had answered Milgrim with another little dip of his head and a muttered something about being delighted of course.
When Milgrim left them alone they looked at each other – a little guiltily, Shep thought. Why did scenarists so often get that feeling of fellow conspirators?
‘I’m afraid I haven’t quite finished your script. I’m a very slow reader.’
Shep wanted to tell Halliday that the script wasn’t really worth his time, that it was just a routine college musical written on order. But then he remembered, almost with a start, that Halliday was being hired to work on Love on Ice. Halliday was being paid to read Love on Ice. Shep wondered why. He wondered what could have happened to Halliday that would bring him down to this.
He watched Halliday’s face as the author supported his head with his thumb to his cheek and two fingers pressed against his forehead. A familiar pose, Shep thought, and then he remembered the jacket of The Night’s High Noon, when Halliday was the wonder boy of the twenties, the triple-threat Merriwell of American letters, less real than the most romantic of his heroes, the only writer who could win the approval of Mencken and Stein and make fifty thousand a year doing it and look like Wally Reid. From the rear flap of that book, Shep remembered the exquisite chiselling of the face, the theatrically perfect features, the straight, classical nose, the mouth so beautiful as to suggest effeminacy, the fine forehead, the slicked-down hair parted in the middle. Only an extra delicacy, a refined quality of sensitivity (was it the faint look of amusement uncorrupted by self-satisfaction about the eyes?) marked the difference between that face on the flap and the favourite face of the period. Strange, Shep thought, how faces pass in and out of style like fashions in clothes. The style to which Halliday belonged was the magazine illustration’s, the matinee idol’s and the movie star’s in 1925, the sleek, shiny, Arrow-Collar perfection, finely etched, sharp-featured, a prettyboy face drawn with the symmetry of second-rate art, pear-shaped, with a straight nose, cleft chin, dark hair parted smartly down the middle, combed back and plastered down with vaseline or sta-comb, the face of someone who has just stepped out of a Turkish bath miraculously recovered from the night before, the clean-cut face of the American sheik, the smoothie, the face of the young sophisticate who has gone places and done things, yet a face curiously unlived in, the face of Neil Hamilton, the face Doug Fairbanks could never quite conceal behind his gay moustaches and Robin Hood’s cap, the face Harold Lloyd parodied, that Ramón Novarro and Valentino gave slinky, south-of-the-border imitations of; this was the face of the twenties, turned in now on a newer, more durable model as befitted more spartan times, but still worn by Manley Halliday like a favourite suit that has not only passed out of style but has worn too thin even for a tailor to patch. The bone structure was still there to remind you of the days when women admirers pasted rotogravure pictures of him inside their copies of his books as others prized photos of John Gilbert and Antonio Moreno. But the hair, still combed back though parted on its side now, was grey and thinning; the famous turquoise eyes had washed out to a milky nondescript; the skin had lost colour and tone; the face that Stieglitz had photographed, Davidson had sculptured and Derain painted with such flattering verisimilitude had lost its lustre. The association pained Shep but he suddenly thought of the famous juvenile of the twenties he had seen on the lot the day before, whose receding hairline and expanding waistline could not alter the fact that he would be a juvenile, irreprievably, until he died.
Reading very slowly, as though reading were a physical effort, the turning of a page a challenge to his strength, Halliday finished the script. Then he read the last page again, stalling for time.
‘Well, Stearns, I don’t suppose you expect to win any Academy Awards with this but’ (Shep saw the attempt at a smile) ‘I suppose it could be worse. I think we may be able to make a nice little valentine out of it.’
But this was the last thing Shep wanted to talk about with Manley Halliday.
‘Mr Halliday, if we stay here and talk, Milgrim’ll think we’re standing by and grab us for a conference. He seems to be queer for these early-morning conferences. So what do you say we go catch a drink somewhere?’
That was as casual as he could make it; he was eager for the answer.
‘I’m not drinking any more.’
Halliday wished he had put it less revealingly. To correct the impression, he added hurriedly: ‘Diabetes. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Then how about a spot of coffee?’
Halliday saw the interest in the young man’s eyes.
‘Well, I should have been in bed hours ago – more doctor’s orders, but maybe one cup of coffee – a quick cup of coffee,’ he amended. He took a childish – or was it an author’s – pride in being able to talk the language of this new generation.
‘Swell. How about the Derby?’
‘Don’t they close at two?’
‘Just the bar. I think we can still get in if we move fast.’
Shep reached the Derby entrance at least five minutes before Halliday. Two newsboys, a legless veteran and a paralytic, guarded the entrance like deformed sentries. Halliday drove up in an ancient Lincoln roadster. Vintage ’33 or ’34, Shep pegged it. What’s he doing with that beat-up old wreck? The paint had faded, one fender was crumpled and the motor obviously laboured under difficulties.
Halliday came toward him out of the darkness of the parking lot and Shep saw why he seemed so out of place here in Beverly Hills; his appearance made no concessions to local fashions. He wore a dark wool overcoat, much too heavy even for the brisk California nights, and a grey homburg. He looked like Fifth Avenue, around the Plaza, on a snappy Sunday afternoon. The image of a ghost came back to Shep as he watched Halliday approach in the pale blur of the street lamps. The ghost goes west, he thought irreverently. Then eagerness hurried him forward.
‘Well, did you think I wasn’t going to make it? The Smithsonian’s been trying to get that bus away from me for years.’
It was forced gaiety, delivered with that forced smile that was beginning to make Shep feel uncomfortable.
The Derby was almost empty. Just a few stragglers, a middle-aged man whose face was no match for his sporty clothes, with a very young showgirl, and two men in their middle thirties whom Shep recognised as a successful writing team.
They couldn’t help watching their waitress’s legs as she strode toward the kitchen. With those Derby get-ups, you had no choice. They wore brown starched hooped skirts that fell short of the knee. It wasn’t graceful or becoming and it certainly wasn’t practical – just a little public exhibition thrown in with the service. The costumes always bothered Shep. It wasn’t like these places he had heard about on the Rue Pigalle where they didn’t wear anything at all. At least that was out in the open. This was American sex, awkward and self-conscious and cautiously obscene.
Shep was wondering what Halliday was thinking about.
‘Have you worked out here a long time, Stearns? You seem to know your way around.’
‘This is my first writing job. But I’ve lived here all my life.’
‘You mean Hollywood’s your home town?’ Halliday was mildly interested. ‘That must have been quite an experience.’
Halliday had the typical outsider’s view of Hollywood. Though now that Shep thought about it, that wasn’t too surprising. One of the weaknesses of Shadow Ball – for all its brilliance – had been the inaccuracy of its atmosphere. Not that any single reference had been mistaken – Halliday was too thorough a craftsman for that – it was just that there had been too much atmosphere, too much Hollywood, the way one sees it when he’s just come in and makes a point of recording all the special things about it, the palm trees, the flamboyancy of the architecture, the jazzed-up mortuaries, the earthquakes, the floods, the pretties on Hollywood Boulevard in their slacks and furs, the million-dollar estates of immigrants who never completely mastered the language of the country they entertain – all these things could be found in Hollywood, but not all run together like that.
‘Hollywood was just the name of my home town when I was a kid,’ Shep tried to explain. ‘I raised pigeons, we had gang fights in vacant lots, I ran the 660 for the class B track team at Hollywood High, I sold magazines at Hollywood and Highland, the good-looking girls I knew in school tried to get into the studios the way girls in Lawrence, Mass., tried to get into the textile mills.’
‘Is your father in the picture business?’
‘In a way. He rents cars to studios, all kinds, museum pieces, trucks, break-aways … See, that’s what I mean, Mr Halliday. I never thought of Hollywood as anything special at all until I went away to Webster.’
‘Webster – I used to go up there for football games and parties.’
‘You did a honey of a job on that flashback to a Webster house party in Friends and Foes, Mr Halliday.’
So the young man did know something about his books. At least he said he did. Even that was something, these days. ‘I used to know Webster pretty well. I went up there for a house party one fall and stayed until Christmas vacation.’
For the first time in years Halliday thought of Hank Osborne, in whose room in the Psi U house he had spent those six crazy weeks. It had been in Hank’s room at three o’clock in the morning that they had both decided to quit school and join the Canadian Air Force. Hank had become one of the first celebrated American flyers. After he was shot down and grounded, they had had some high times together in Paris. Hank had written the first sensitive account of a flyer’s experiences, done a little painting, married Mignon, contributed to transition and helped edit it for a while – then had come that horrendous night – it almost seemed in his life the inevitable night – of the fight: my God, he couldn’t even remember touching Minnie … Years later he had heard that Hank was back at Webster teaching European literature or something.
‘You didn’t happen to know an instructor called Osborne up there? Hank Osborne?’
‘Professor Osborne! Sure, I had him in Modern French Literature. A swell Joe. And terrific on Zola and Balzac. He was head of our chapter of the League Against War and Fascism when I was up there.’
Yes, Halliday remembered Hank’s going left. Back from Paris in ’31, out of a job, out of money and, even more serious, out of a way of life, there probably hadn’t seemed any other place for Hank to go.
‘Professor Osborne’s a great admirer of yours, Mr Halliday.’
So Hank hadn’t let these years – Lord, was it more than ten! – of bad feeling influence his opinion of Manley’s work. Well, that was pretty decent of Hank, more than he might have expected. After all, in those good years on the continent, Hank had been mighty jealous of his success. The time he accepted Hank’s invitation to tell him exactly what he thought of his novel, for instance, the one that never got published – that’s what it had really been about, not the silly drunken business of Mignon.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear I still have a few boosters.’
Halliday had meant it to pass for modesty. He was a little dismayed himself at the tone of self-pity that accompanied it. This had happened several times recently and he must guard against it. There must be no more of this going around to the back door begging complimentary handouts.
‘Mr Halliday, I might as well jump in with both feet. I’ve read all your books. High Noon was the closest thing to a Bible I had in college. There used to be a group of us at Webster who’d sit around quoting Halliday to each other.’
‘Is that so?’
Shep saw a flicker of interest in Halliday’s eyes.
‘I know it sounds kind of – grandiose, but our whole intellectual attitude toward the war and the twenties was based more than anything else on Friends and Foes and The Night’s High Noon. Gee, Keith Winters, Ted Bentley and those other characters of yours, we knew them so well they were almost like room-mates.’
Halliday was listening intently. Shep hurried on.
‘I really felt I was living through the twenties with Ted Bentley. He was such a terrific symbol of the conflicting values of the times, the corrosive materialism. And yet he wasn’t a symbol. Not a theory dressed up as a man like Charley Anderson in USA. Bentley lives in your book. Sometimes in school I’d find myself arguing about various attitudes typical of the twenties as if I had actually been around in those days and experienced them myself. And then I’d realise it was actually Ted Bentley’s experiences, Ted’s attitudes I had lived my way into.’
