Shorty McAdoo has been dragging his feet, stonewalling for three days. Every night Fitz phones and shouts curses at me when I tell him I’ve got nothing usable yet. I try to get through to Chance on my own, to explain the situation, but can’t. Now I come home and find this note shoved under my apartment door.
Dearest Little Truth Seeker,
Rachel Gold demands you dance attendance upon her tonight. I shall collect you by taxi at eight o’clock. Dress: tuxedo and shoes. Shine the shoes. Since it is doubtful you own a flannel shoe-cloth, have recourse to the same dirty underwear with which it is rumoured you dry cocktail glasses. Apply polish, rub briskly. To shoes, not cocktail glasses. Comb your hair. Shave.
None of this is negotiable.
Yours,
Rachel
I am going to be questioned about Chance. There is no escaping Rachel Gold’s voracious curiosity. “Describe Mr. Chance using four and only four adjectives.” A parlour game of her invention. Four won’t cover the entire territory, she likes to say, but at least they tell you what you really think about someone. I try it now, while I dress. The four I come up with are obsessive, mystical, eccentric, ruthless. Only one of these adjectives really surprises me. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized I believed Chance was ruthless. The word doesn’t seem to fit a man so shy, but it won’t be dismissed either. Ruthless sticks.
These four adjectives lead me to the noun artist. Maybe Chance is an artist. Three of these characteristics – obsession, eccentricity, ruthlessness – earmark two of Hollywood’s greatest artists, Erich von Stroheim and D.W. Griffith. They are also slowly destroying them. Maybe Chance has the last two ingredients necessary to complete the great artist – mysticism and money.
By now I’m dressed in my shiny tux and my shiny shoes and it’s only seven-thirty. I decide to wait outside. It is a warm evening, the street mostly quiet because it is the supper hour. A few cars pass and a few would-be actresses slink by me on the sidewalk, their hipbones thrust out in the mannequin walk which is à la mode. You can imagine them carrying four-foot-long cigarette holders. Mine is a low-end show-biz neighbourhood of unsuccessful vaudevillians, of young men with sleek hair and pencil-thin moustaches, of dancers who undulate their bellies as extras in Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars, of violin players who saw background music to assist actors and actresses in summoning up the appropriate emotions for scenes of clamorous passion. Late at night my neighbourhood is a scene of strange comings and goings, of cars backfiring in the street at three a.m., of drunken cursing, of bottles breaking on the pavement, of women screaming.
A cab swings to the curb. I open the back door and slide in beside Rachel Gold. “How nice it is to be reunited with an old friend after such a very, very long time,” she says.
“Three weeks.”
She takes a compact out and starts working on herself, trying to obliterate the faint mist of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Only three weeks? My but how the time flies when one of us is having a good time.”
“Who says I’m having a good time?”
“You always had a good time working for me, didn’t you?”
Her skin is luminous ivory, her eyes almond-shaped, large, very green. The punch of these eyes had been diminished in black and white, but they still managed to win her several small parts in pictures before she decided to write movies rather than act in them. Tonight she wears a silk flapper dress striped in three varieties of green which causes the exact shade of her eyes to alter in sympathy every time she moves.
“Where to, lady?” the cabbie wants to know.
“Cocoanut Grove.”
“Oh, shit.” I put my head in my hands.
“Don’t be like that, Harry. We need to have a serious talk.” She lays her hand on my knee to demonstrate she means it. She shouldn’t do that.
“Right, pondering a stuffed monkey’s ass will turn anybody serious.” I hate the Cocoanut Grove. I hate the famous décor. When maitre d’ Jimmy Manos heard the rumour from Rudy Valentino that the studio was getting ready to pitch the artificial palms used during shooting of The Sheik, Manos snapped them up for his new nightclub. He added a further charming touch – stuffed monkeys that can be run up and down the palms on a string. The worst is when Manos invites male club-goers to “date” the monkeys. The drunken scramble for apes often leads to brawls. The Grove is famous for its punch-ups. The tradition began on opening night two years ago when Jimmy Manos personally cold-cocked two stars; sometimes the personnel of competing studios fight pitched battles on the dance floor.
I’ve only been there a couple of times with Rachel – I couldn’t get past the door on my own – but Jimmy Manos thinks Rachel looks splendid, exotic against the Moorish décor. Rachel is good-looking enough to get in even on a Tuesday night, which is the night to be seen at the Cocoanut Grove, the night when Pickford and Fairbanks, Bebe Daniels, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Barbara La Marr, Chaplin, Ben Lyon, and Nita Naldi come out in force to judge the Charleston contests and provide wall-to-wall glamour.
But this is a Thursday, so there shouldn’t be too much difficulty in running me by the doorman. The cab pulls up to the Ambassador Hotel and Rachel sashays us into the Grove, gamine face powdered bedsheet white, black bobbed hair vibrating with energy, dynamo idling, the famous Gold electricity just a hum, occasional crackle, spark, as her hips twitch their way through the tables guided by Jimmy himself. Rachel prepared to run full throttle, sending high-voltage bursts clear through the scalp, that blue-black hair standing on end, screaming, Look out! Gold coming through!
Heads turn everywhere. She is beautiful.
The table is not the best – the Grove is full for a Thursday – but it’s private. Rachel pries open her purse and produces two flasks, one of martinis, one of brandy. “Do the honours, dear,” she says, and I pour drinks underneath the table. We stare out at the dance floor, all the pretty little things of both sexes cavorting like mad to dance music dominated by horns. Rachel tosses one leg over the other in a flash of silk stocking and starts it pumping up and down like the handle of a car jack. A hand flies up and grabs a hank of hair which she twists, tugs, tortures – a sure and deadly sign she has something she wants to get off her mind.
“What do you have to talk to me about, Rachel?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off the dancers. “Yesterday, one of the guys from payroll calls Donner to verify whether the cheque he’s cutting you is correct. It’s a big jump – from seventy-five dollars a week to a hundred and fifty dollars. He wants to know whether Donner authorized it. Donner says no, there must be some screw-up. An hour later payroll calls and says, “Sorry to have bothered you. The raise came from upstairs.” She unclutches the handful of hair, turns to me, takes a drink. “It started people in the writing department talking, Harry.”
“Talking about what?”
“They wonder how a title-writer gets his salary doubled. They ask themselves, What’s all that money for?”
“Maybe it’s none of their business what it’s for. Did you tell them that?”
“Some people say it’s snitch money.” She says this in a level voice, waits for an answer.
“Snitch money for what?”
“Some of the boys think you might be giving the names of anybody who talks union talk.” Rachel’s politics are vague, but they’re definitely what people call progressive.
“You’re the only person at Best Chance I’ve ever heard advocate a union. Do you think I sold you out?”
She leans across the table; the white face blazes in the candlelight. “No, I don’t, Harry. But I’m not the one who needs convincing. A lot of people find what’s going on with you strange. They’d like an explanation for it. Maybe you owe me an explanation because I’m your friend.”
“Maybe a friend ought to change her tone if she’s a friend. It sounds prosecutorial to me.”
“Gibson is the one with the theory that you’re selling out the union sympathizers. He says Fitz is always sniffing around about unions.”
“Gibson is a burned-out refugee from the old kerosene circuit -he’s got melodrama on the brain. I’ve got a job on a picture, nothing more.”
“I told them that. But all the stuff that’s happened in the last two or three years makes people very nervous. Hays. The morals clauses in contracts. Private dicks running all over Hollywood bribing housemaids, peeking in windows, reading mail for the studio bosses. The bosses have made up their minds about one thing – there aren’t going to be any more scandals. Arbuckle was just the tip of the iceberg. William Desmond Taylor gets murdered and half of Hollywood is suspected, big stars like Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand. Then the newspapers report Normand has a two-thousand-dollar-a-week cocaine habit. Zelda Crosby commits suicide. Dorothy Davenport has heroin-addict hubby Wally Reid locked up in the loonie bin and he dies in a padded cell. One disaster after another. Like Queen Victoria, the Great American Public is not amused; in Des Moines and Poughkeepsie they whisper Sodom and Gomorrah. Panic spreads among movie executives, they wring their hands, they sweat bullets. Does it bear thinking about? Your future, this beautiful industry which you built with your own two hands, this golden goose should be cooked by such irresponsible people? By these schmucks, these schickers, these pishers?” Rachel is rolling now, her hands are waving, her foot is going up and down so fast it’s become a tic. “Somebody save us! the moguls cry. We need a knight in shining armour! Find us a sanctimonious, two-faced little prick with a reputation pure as the driven snow! Enter Willie-Puller Hays, the man in charge of President Harding’s election campaign, former member of his illustrious cabinet, a shyster with his foot in the Washington door, a one-time legislator who can reassure men of influence, probity, and judgement there’s no need for government censorship – Let Willie pull that wire. And how well he does! Remember his famous statement that the potential of the movies for moral and educational influence is boundless, and it is our sacred duty to America’s youth to work in concert with their teachers and clergymen to make a wholesome impression on their minds?” Rachel sticks a forefinger in her mouth and mimes puking. “And the studio heads, Zukor and Loew and Fox and Goldwyn and Warner, they all nod their heads in grave unanimity. ‘That is so,’ they say. ‘Let us tenderly mould the minds of America’s youth so that they spend their nickels on our pictures. But let us not lead them astray. If we must reveal to them the mysteries of the female body such as – tits – let Cecil B. DeMille be the man to do it, tastefully, in an uplifting religious picture such as The Ten Commandments. Tit-shaking in godless Egypt, that’s the ticket. Tit-shimmying, belly-dancing, and butt-waggling raised to a level both educational and moral. Educational in the sense that we can show how people who had the misfortune not to be Americans once lived in utter tit-shaking misery. Moral in that we can show how God is inclined to punish tit-shakers as ruthlessly as Will Hays himself. This is the message we must impart to America’s youth! No tit-shaking! No tit-ogling! Unless in a good cause! Such as the moral and educational one in which we are ourselves engaged to assist America’s clergy and teachers!’ ”
A waiter has arrived to take our order. He discreetly hovers, overawed by her vehemence. I signal to Rachel we have company. She hasn’t looked at the menu but knows what she wants. What we both want. “Two steaks. Rare. Lots of fried mushrooms. Asparagus.”
The waiter flees. Rachel resumes, calmer, quieter. “Hays is making everybody gun-shy. Right now the studios use private detectives to dig up possible scandal, but it’s only a short step before we’ll be squealing on one another. The Hearst papers may howl about the Red terror in Russia, but it won’t be long before the Hollywood terror will teach the Bolsheviks a lesson or two. Maybe the boys in the office think you’re informing on their private life to Chance.”
I lean back in my chair. “I’m not.” I wait to let the statement sink in. “Besides, Chance hates Will Hays as much as any of us.”
“This I believe,” says Rachel. “A studio head who hates Mr. Hays. Whom they own lock, stock, and barrel. Who is their paid policeman. Where did you get this unimpeachable information from? Who’s your source? Mildred in wardrobe?”
“Chance told me himself.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot. The man with whom it is harder to get an audience than it was with Louis the Fourteenth chooses to unburden himself to My Little Truth Seeker.”
“I don’t know if you’d call it unburdening. We’ve had a number of conversations in the last couple of weeks.”
Her eyebrows lift sceptically. “Plural? Conversations?”
Just then, Bill Heidt, a writer at Fox, weaves drunkenly over to our table and invites Rachel to dance. She waves him away like a bad smell. “No time for dancing, Billy-boy. Rachel’s feet are firmly planted on the Road to Damascus. A revelation awaits her. Take a hike.”
Heidt, muttering, zigzags back to his table of cronies. When he arrives, his failure is applauded with shouts of derision.
“So tell me, what is the nature of your conversations, Harry?”
I know any mention of Shorty McAdoo is definitely out of bounds, but I don’t see any harm in gossip of a general kind. “They’re not very different from what you and I talk about at the office. He likes to talk about ideas. It’s not easy to explain … he’s a kind of amateur historian and philosopher.”
“So what’s he doing in Hollywood? In my experience, millionaire amateurs like Joe Kennedy, William Randolph Hearst, and Damon Ira Chance get into the picture business for only two reasons. Prestige pussy and to make money.”
I let it out before thinking. “He wants to make the great American movie.”
“Such a small ambition?”
“You don’t repeat what I just said. You understand? Not a word.”
“Tell me more. My lips are sealed.” She refills our glasses with gin, a subtle inducement.
“Okay, laugh if you want. The guy uses words like art when he talks about movies. He’s idealistic. He wants to make films like Griffith.”
“Now there’s a noble ambition,” says Rachel. “To make movies portraying the Negro as stupid, shiftless, and single-mindedly determined to slake his lust with white women. What a great public-relations job he did for the Klan and the lynching industry.”
“An admiration for Griffith as artist doesn’t necessarily make someone a Klansman, does it?”
“I find the two hard to separate, Harry. But then I’m a little touchy on the subject of the Klan. As a Jew I’ve got reason to be.”
“Don’t start tarring me with that brush, Rachel. I’m not defending the Klan. I’m not defending Griffith’s film. I am making a point. The point is that a bad man might be a good artist. Example. Byron. Good poet – bad man. See?”
“And what about Chance? What’s he? Good man or bad man?”
“From your tone of voice it sounds to me you may have already formed an opinion on the subject. All I’ve got to say is that he’s treated me very decently.”
“Maybe I have doubts because of the company he keeps.”
“Are you referring to me?”
“No. That bastard Fitzsimmons.”
With Fitz, I feel I’m on thinner ice. I light a cigarette. “I’ll grant you that Fitz is not an attractive personality. I’ve had my run-ins with him. He’s hard and he’s ignorant. In that respect he’s not much different from all the rest of the men in charge of studios. How’s he any different from Louis B. Mayer?”
“He isn’t a Jew.”
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
“Then maybe you ought to explain.”
Rachel holds out her glass for replenishing. “All I’ve got to say,” she begins as the martini splashes into it, “is that when I first came out to Hollywood there were signs up in all the rooming houses. They read: ‘No Dogs, No Actors, No Jews.’ ” She leaves it there.
“And? The signs didn’t have much effect, did they? Because there’s no shortage of all three in Hollywood now.”
“That’s right. Hollywood grew to love dogs and actors. You can’t beat that Rin Tin Tin. He’s swell. But Jews … well, Jews aren’t as naturally lovable as dogs and actors. Everybody knows about kikes. As Mary Pickford says to Douglas Fairbanks when he’s being difficult, ‘Careful, Doug. The Jew’s coming out in you.’ ” And poor Doug, he’s only half a Hebe.”
“So shame on her. But what’s that got to do with Fitz?”
“He’s an anti-Semite.”
I take a drink. “So’s Henry Ford. But he’s on the record. He bought a newspaper to promulgate his views. Where’s the proof when it comes to Fitz?”
“The way he looks at me.”
“That clinches it. The way he looks at you.”
Suddenly she’s very angry, her eyes flash green fire. “I grew up in New York. I know the look, Harry. Don’t make light of it. My brothers got called Christ-killers and beaten up by Irish Catholic toughs often enough for me to be able to recognize it when I see it.”
“I stand rebuked. All Irish Catholics are anti-Semites?”
“Why are you defending him?” she bursts out. “Why are you cross-examining me? Who do you think you are? Chief legal counsel for the Klan?”
“Point of order,” I say. “Fitz would not be welcome in the Klan – he’s a Catholic. Maybe you two have more in common than you think.”
The steaks arrive. The waiter manoeuvres them into position in a bristling silence. The band has taken a break and the Grove is as quiet as it ever gets. Rachel and I eat without speaking. When I can’t stand it any more I say, “Listen.” She doesn’t look up. I rap the table hard with the butt of my knife. “Listen!” Her eyes lift, reluctantly. “You’ve got to believe me, Rachel. They haven’t asked me a single thing about anybody I work with. Nothing. I swear to you.” I actually raise my hand. All that’s needed to complete the picture is a Bible. “I’m not selling anybody out.”
Rachel gives me a despairing look, reaches out and catches my jacket sleeve in a white-knuckled grip. Like she’s teetering on a precipice. “Don’t you get it, Harry?” she whispers fiercely. “I’m warning what might happen. To me as much as to you. In a single year I make more money than my father did in ten. And the more money I make, the more I’m afraid of losing it. Chains of gold are the hardest chains to break.” She makes a sweeping gesture that takes in the Grove, the diners. “Do you think anyone in this room has even considered they might have to give this up? Even entertained the notion? I started in movies because they were fun. They’re not fun any more and I’m still here. Why? Because I got used to good clothes, money, fame of a sort. But I liked it better when we wrote a scenario Tuesday, filmed it on Wednesday. Finis. Everybody an outlaw. Patent-breakers, fly-by-night independents, here today, gone tomorrow. Making it up as we went along. You know what, Harry? It wasn’t respectable to be in pictures then. A reputable stage actor wouldn’t appear on screen; they considered photoplays the kiss of death. Hollywood was the end of the earth, the place that in the Middle Ages used to be marked on maps: “Here Be Monsters.” And we were monsters – misfits and crackpots, dreamers and schemers. But slowly, step by step, bit by bit, money transformed us until one day we woke up and found ourselves lords of the earth. Making more money than the President of the United States. Maybe exerting more influence. Our childhood was over, Harry. We were no longer kids dressing up in mother’s clothes, telling each other nutty stories and falling all over ourselves laughing. Fifteen years ago you could make a picture for a thousand dollars. Now they put up von Stroheim’s production costs on a billboard in New York. He’s gone over a million! they scream.” She pours herself another drink; the alcohol is showing its effect. “We made stupid movies then. They were fun. Even more fun to make than to watch. We still make stupid movies, but they’re not fun to make any more. Too much at stake. Every stupid movie we launch we cross our fingers and pray it isn’t the Titanic, because if it is, we’re all on the deck chairs. The question is, What’ll we do to get into the lifeboats?”
Another interloper. Sammy Burns from the Fox table.
“Speaking of stupid movies – here is the king of the stupid movie,” says Rachel. “Nobody can write them stupider than Sammy.”
Sammy is too far gone to absorb this. “C’mon, Goldie,” he coaxes, “cut the rug with old Sammy. Be a peach.” He executes a couple of haphazard steps with one hand pressed to his stomach and the other held at eleven o’clock. His face is shining with sweat and his white tie has come undone.
“You be a peach,” says Rachel. “Climb in a bowl on your dining-room table and be a peach there, Sammy. I’m not in the mood for dancing.”
Burns abruptly halts his solo. “If I were you, I’d be nice to people. You might need a friend when Mr. Eastern Seaboard finishes running his studio into bankruptcy. I know people,” he says.
“A word of advice, Sammy,” says Rachel. “Modesty becomes you as much as anything can. Aspire to modesty. And the day I need help from you getting a job in this town is the day that Gog and Magog stalk the earth.”
Sammy rocks back and forth on his heels. “What?”
“Exactly,” says Rachel. “And please tell the other dreamboats at the Fox table not to bother putting themselves on offer here. I breathe my quota of cigar breath at the office. Now run along. This is the adults’ table.”
Sammy departs in high dudgeon.
Rachel says, “So what are you doing for Chance now?”
“Research.”
“Which you can’t talk about.”
“That’s right.”
“And after that?”
“I think he’s going to let me write the picture.”
“That’s a big step.”
“I know it.”
Rachel purses her lips, lifts her glass, “Congratulations. To Harry Vincent, scenarist of photoplays.” She notices her glass is empty. “Any more gin?”
I shake the flask. It’s empty. “Nothing but the brandy.”
“Pour, My Little Truth Seeker, pour.”
I do. Neither of us seems to want to take up where we left off. I can feel between us the sour disquiet of stubborn people. I put her behaviour down to jealousy. It irks her that Chance has spirited away her disciple. Although she always thinks herself in the right, she is never so certain that she doesn’t value a loyal seconder. For a year and a half I have seconded all her motions in the writing department, and when she laid down the law about Mencken, Dreiser, and Norris, I seconded that too. I seconded her when she expounded her theory of photoplays. I knew no others. It is Rachel Gold who taught me my job.
I don’t really know why I defended Fitz. My motives are complicated. I certainly don’t like him, or even respect him, while I have loved and admired Rachel from the moment she swept down on me at that lunch counter in L.A. like a wolf on the fold, seizing my heart in her jaws.
I love her in the only way I can, silently, humbly, discreetly, from a distance. I know that she will never be interested in a rail-thin, gangly, bespectacled man so ordinary-looking that to be truly ugly would lend him some badly needed distinction. I do not lie awake at night imagining the impossible, tormenting myself. Not any more anyway. Friendship is the best I can hope for. I love her with resignation.
Perhaps these are the reasons I see her more clearly than is usual in a case of unrequited love. I know she drinks too much, throws herself at pretty, stupid men. I know that her progressive politics (sometimes she calls herself a socialist) collide with her taste for the high life, and that her brittle gaiety and white-powdered face are both attempts to mask Jewish melancholy and ethical rage.
Thirty years later I still do not know why I loved her with a husband’s love rather than the blind passion women like her seem to require – only that I did. But I do know what I admired in her. She had no calculation in her. Which is not to say she was ever blind to what she was doing. She understood the consequences of her adventures, was ready to live with them, was ready not to make excuses. Her mistakes were on a grand scale. She made enemies and friends with abandon, embracing both as badges of honour. She carried her head high. Hers was the beauty of courage and intelligence, to be read in her face, in her eyes, in her passionate, grasping, darting hands. She was a passionate, grasping, darting woman. Rachel Gold sometimes confused rudeness with honesty, but never honesty with anything else.
I am thinking these things when I spot William DeShane crossing the floor, headed in our general direction. The look on my face alerts Rachel. “What?” she says sharply. I don’t answer; I’m watching him. William DeShane has caught more than my attention; a lot of people are suspending their conversations, neglecting their shrimp and soup and meringues to follow him with a hungrier interest.
William DeShane is a graceful man, capable of sailing across a room without faltering under close inspection because he is confident inspection will find him faultless. At the moment he is attracting more stares than even a great star might expect to attract because the diners in the Grove are industry insiders, and for insiders a star in the making is more fascinating than a star made. Nobody knows just how big William DeShane might get, but the guess is very, very big indeed. They watch to see which table he is headed for, who among them swings enough weight to receive a courtesy call from William DeShane. This is not Tuesday. This is small-fry night.
He stops at our table, addresses Rachel. “Miss Gold?” I can sense him basking in the knowledge that all the eyes in the room are upon him.
“That’s right,” she says.
“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is –”
She finishes for him. “William DeShane.”
He bows. “I am flattered that one of the ornaments of our industry should know my name. It goes without saying that I am a very great admirer of your work.”
“Say it anyway. Tell him to say it, Harry.”
“Say it.” I try to sound as bored as humanly possible. DeShane offers his hand for me to shake. “William DeShane.” The palm is cool and dry, a confident temperature. Mine isn’t.
“Harry Vincent.”
He’s no longer looking at me. His eyes are doing a slow pan of the room. I’ll give him this. The man is an actor. He imagines cameras everywhere, all on him. It gives me a moment’s satisfaction to note that his eyes are a smidgen too close together, that he’s one hundredth of an inch short of perfection.
“Would you care to dance, Miss Gold?”
“Excuse us, Harry,” says Rachel rising.
There’s a way that a woman folds herself into a man when they waltz that is like handwriting on the wall. I can read it in very big letters. Everybody watches them simply because they are a beautiful couple. The mensch pays the bill. The gigolo’s evening is just beginning.