Marcus dropped the Hollywood Reporter onto his desk and shook his head. He’d always thought of Kathryn’s boss as a blowhard whose bonnet always had room for more bees, and his column confirmed that day after day. His now infamous “A Vote For Stalin” column where he’d named names had been bad enough. But then he decided to take his feud to the Screen Writers Guild and started throwing around words like “Catholic” and “Pope” and “Communist” and “Russia” as though he was running for president.
Marcus personally knew many of the screenwriters Wilkerson had listed—some of them at MGM, and some from the Garden of Allah. By printing these names right after posing questions like “Were they Communists or commissars of thought? Were they party-liners or fronters?,” Wilkerson was signaling to Hollywood that he expected everyone to take sides.
Either get on board with me, or get out of my way. This is war.
He caught sight of his receptionist at his office door, squinting at him. He folded his Reporter. “You need something?”
“Security called. Said they’ve got someone asking to see you, and want to know if they should let him in.”
“Did they get a name?”
Dierdre consulted a slip of paper. “Anson Purvis.”
Marcus dropped his face into his hands. He had been expecting a letter or telegram or phone call from this wannabe screenwriter with the hard-luck story, and was planning to fob the guy off with the standard “Sorry, but our roster of writers is full.”
“You want them to send him on his way?”
Marcus thought about the two thousand bucks Wardell had sacrificed to get this guy through the door. “Send him up.”
* * *
Anson Purvis’ beefed-up, outdoorsy frame filled Marcus’ doorway. His white-blond hair was cropped in a military crew cut that suited the sharp angles of his open, mid-Plains face. His Scandinavian blue eyes were ice-pick sharp, the type to take in every detail—a handy quality for a screenwriter.
Marcus reached out to shake Purvis’ hand.
“I didn’t realize I was supposed to make an appointment first.” Clutching a black leather satchel like a security blanket, Purvis took the closer of the two chairs.
“I was expecting to hear from you before now,” Marcus said.
Purvis nodded. “I was going to come the day after I got the call from Cliff, but I took a nasty tumble on the steps out front of my apartment and ended up in the veterans hospital down on Wilshire. Did Cliff tell you about this?” He rapped three times on his leg—a dull, heavy thud. He offered Marcus a pained smile. “Took a while to recover.”
“I hear you saw some heavy action. Iwo Jima, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. Land mines have a way of knocking a guy out but good.” The pained smile persisted. “Here’s a tip. If you’re going to get blown apart, make sure you do it next to the most experienced medic in the Pacific.”
A month before Pearl Harbor took the world by surprise, Marcus tried to sign up for the navy but was rejected on account of his poor eyesight. In the intervening years, he’d wondered what might have happened if the navy had rubber-stamped him. But sitting opposite this burly amputee with the vigilant eyes reminded Marcus how narrowly he’d avoided that kind of fate.
“But that’s my past,” Purvis said. “I came here to talk about my future.”
“Yes, about that. I don’t know what Clifford Wardell promised you, but we don’t have—”
“I know I don’t have any practical experience to speak of, but we’ve all got to start somewhere, right? And there’s a lot to be said for growing up around Leonard Purvis.”
Marcus sat up like a jack-in-the-box. Leonard Purvis was legendary. His career straddled the silent and sound eras, during which he wrote some of the most successful Westerns to come out of Hollywood, including nearly all the biggest hits for Hoot Gibson, Harry Carey, and Tom Mix. If you were a producer who wanted to make a Western, the first thing you did was try and convince Leonard Purvis to write the screenplay.
“He’s your father?”
Anson Purvis blinked. “Cliff didn’t tell you?”
Marcus wondered why Wardell failed to mention the single most persuasive detail that would’ve convinced him that their deal was on the up-and-up. “No, he didn’t.”
“Good, ’cause I don’t want to ride into town on my father’s horse,” Purvis said. “Dad instilled in me two things: a strong sense of good ol’ American patriotism, and what it takes to put together a good story. Before the war, I used to work construction. It paid well, especially for a guy with no college education. But I was like one of those fountains, always gurgling up a constant stream of ideas. The fellas on the crew used to kid me a lot on account of the fact I used to sit up there and dream up all these tales.”
This big lug is just like me. “My teacher would yell at me in front of the whole class for staring out the window all the livelong day.”
“You too, huh?” Purvis smiled, showing two rows of milk-fed teeth the size of movie posters.
Marcus pulled himself up short. This guy is here because of Clifford Wardell. If something goes wrong and the brass asks you where the hell you found this schmuck, do you really want to say he came from the guy who wrote Reds in the Beds?
“That’s all well and good,” he said, “but here at MGM, we don’t make many Westerns.”
“Fine, because I don’t want to write ’em.”
“What do you want to write?”
“War pictures. The way I figure it, people want to know what it really was like in the war. We fought the fight and won—that makes for heroes, and if there’s one thing the American moviegoer loves, it’s a hero.”
The guy had obviously thought through his argument.
Purvis shifted forward until he was perched on the edge of his seat. “I can see you don’t want to hire me. And that’s okay—as long as you’re saying no because I haven’t convinced you I’m good enough for MGM, and not because you associate me with Clifford Wardell.”
Outside Marcus’ window, somewhere on the lot, gunfire pelted the air from the set of Courage of Lassie. Marcus didn’t think much of the story—Lassie improbably ends up on the battlefield of the Aleutian Islands—but the volley of bullets helped to underscore Purvis’ point about war pictures.
“Go on,” Marcus said.
“You’ve met Wardell, right? Not exactly an upstanding example of American citizenhood.”
“I thought you were a friend of his.”
“He and my dad were on the college debate team that won the national championship three years running. My dad’s a real loyal kind of guy. He knows Cliff ain’t exactly war-hero material, but in his book, a pal is a pal.”
“What about in your book?”
“In mine, a schmuck is a schmuck. Clifford Wardell is an A-1, first-class schmuck. And that novel he wrote proves it, right?” The guy got to his feet, wincing from a sudden pain that Marcus could almost feel shoot through his own body. “Lookit, the truth is I didn’t take any tumble outside my apartment. I didn’t contact you because I didn’t want you to think that I was any friend of Cliff’s.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I was visiting my dad and he brought it up. Told me you were the guy who wrote Free Leningrad! and that was the best goddamned picture to come out of Hollywood during the whole war. A nod from you would mean a whole lot to me.”
Marcus was starting to thaw.
Purvis got to his feet. “You’re a busy guy and I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”
Marcus stared at the guy’s huge hands. “You must’ve been very good at construction work.”
“I’m better at constructing a meaty plot.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I brought some with me.” Purvis lifted the flap of his satchel and pulled out three stacks of paper.
“Which is the best one?”
The guy dropped the top script in front of Marcus.
THE FINAL DAY
AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY BY ANSON PURVIS
Marcus looked up at the hopeful face. “A hundred words or less. Convince me.”
“Okay, so it’s the final day of the war in Europe before Germany surrenders. The audience knows this, and the Germans know it, but our hero doesn’t. He’s an American infantryman whose entire company has been cornered by a last-ditch Kraut offensive intent on killing as many Americans as they can before they have to endure the humiliation of surrender. He’s almost out of ammo and food and water, but he learns there’s a cache of supplies in the basement of a house at the edge of Berlin. It’s a race against time to hold out for the official surrender, and it’s a race for the last stockpile that might save the lives of his buddies.”
Purvis extended his hand. This time, the handshake was firmer, more earnest.
Marcus asked, “How do I contact you?”
“My address is on the second page.”
“Let me walk you out.”
Purvis waved away Marcus’ offer. “I’ve taken up enough of your day, Mr. Adler. I can make my own way.”
As Marcus stood at his window waiting for Purvis to emerge from the building, he saw Mickey Rooney hurry past. Production had started on Love Laughs at Andy Hardy. Rooney was twenty-six now and could scarcely be expected to play the love-struck teenager much longer. As Rooney stopped in front of a mirror parked outside Soundstage 16 to check his tan woolen army uniform, Purvis walked past with a distinct limp that he’d been able to hide in front of Marcus. He watched Purvis trek to the front gate, wave at the security guard, and disappear around the corner.
Marcus stayed at the window and rubbed his chin. He wanted to go with his gut, and his gut said this Anson Purvis was the real McCoy.