ROB KIPLINGER WAS TIRED … tired of the morning fogs and tired of the afternoon sunshine … tired of the good pictures he never produced, tired of all the money it made for him … tired of the people who loved him, baby … above all tired of being Rob Kiplinger and of the knowledge that no matter how tired he was of being Rob Kiplinger he would probably never make the slightest effort to be something better.
He sat at his massive desk, gloomily examined the sprawling litter of unfinished business, noted that it was twenty past five of a dying October afternoon, and scowled impatiently as his secretary padded in noiselessly over the thick beige carpeting.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kiplinger,” she announced.
“I’m sorry, too, Miss Delmar,” he said, looking out of the French windows at the California sun trying to make believe that it wasn’t autumn. “I’m sorry I ever left New York. I’m sorry my brother-in-law knew the head of this studio. I’m sorry my name isn’t Darryl F. Zanuck. I’m sorry I have been given a secretary who is always walking in here and being sorry about something. What is it you’re sorry about this time?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kiplinger,” said Miss Delmar, “but that girl is here. The one that called twice this morning. She said Ferdinand Saxon told her to see you about—”
“Yes,” Kiplinger said flatly, letting Miss Delmar wait while he squeezed the sweet nectar from a tiny delay of the inevitable. Then he looked up and said, “What was her name again?”
“Janice Barker. She got in from New York yesterday.”
“Okay,” he sighed, and Miss Delmar padded out again. His fingers moved automatically to the knot of his tie, but there was no tie. He had been in Hollywood for five years, but somehow his hands had never learned to accept the fact that the rightful place of his tie had been usurped by a paisley scarf, a pretender to the throne. He made an effort to pull the loose ends of his nerves together into what he hoped was a semblance of the kind of man who had good digestion and who would think Miltown was the name of a horse. Then he called jovially, “Come in—Come in!”
The girl walked in a little too casually to be genuinely casual, and Kiplinger’s quick, practiced eyes photographed her from head to toe in a rapid-shutter exposure. She would be even more beautiful if she were smiling. Why couldn’t they ever get it into their heads that it isn’t attractive to look scared? Unless you’re playing opposite the creature from the black lagoon.
“Hel-lo,” he cooed. He stood up and took her proffered hand and held it between his large, warm hands, and he noticed that hers was cold and that her blue eyes were not smiling with her mouth. “Sit down, honey,” he said. “How was the trip? Tell me about Ferdie Saxon. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about everything.”
“The trip was simply horrid,” she said, sinking into the green club chair. She recited the details and Kiplinger shook his head sympathetically, though he was only half listening. She had fine, small features and long auburn hair and good legs and there were no circles under her eyes and to Kiplinger her beauty was exquisite, but he was struck with the vague feeling that whatever she had was not for films and could be put to better use making some young man happy, or miserable, for the rest of his life.
“Didn’t Mr. Saxon write to you about me?” she was saying. “He promised me he would before I left.”
“Well, you know how it is,” he said. “Our mailing room probably sent the letter to the story department by mistake, where it was quickly synopsized by a reader, bought by the studio, scripted by a former Theatre Guild playwright, and is probably being shot this very minute on Sound Stage Three, right over there.” He pointed out of the open French windows, but when he saw the disappointment clouding her face, he added, “No, honey, I’m sorry. I received no letter about you from Ferdie. But why let that bother you? You’re here. I’m here. I love you.”
“Mr. Kiplinger,” the girl said, a little too desperately, he thought, “I do want so terribly to get into pictures. Mr. Saxon said you would help me, and it means so awfully much to me.”
He tapped the desk nervously with a pencil.
“I’ve had quite a bit of acting experience, Mr. Kiplinger: Lots of television, and two seasons at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis. Of course, that’s only summer stock, but Mr. Aldrich told someone he thought I had a charming stage personality, and last spring I had a small part in Louder and Funnier. It died in Boston, but the critic on the Herald was awfully nice to me. Mr. Saxon says that’s where he saw me. …
“Tell me something,” Kiplinger said, scowling, “are you a … a personal friend of Ferdie Saxon?”
“Well … frankly, no … not really,” she apologized, looking down at her hands and not seeing his scowl relax. “I met him at one of those cocktail parties at the St. Regis, for Fred Gimble, the movie director. I spilled some Scotch on my dress, and Ferdie Saxon came over and helped me clean it, and naturally we got to talking. When I happened to tell him that I was going to the Coast soon and that I would do anything, but really anything, to get into pictures, he laughed and said, ‘Well, then—why don’t you see Rob Kiplinger?’ Everyone there laughed—for the life of me I couldn’t see why—but they all agreed with him.”
He cleared his throat sharply and threw the pencil down on the desk, but the trouble with clearing your throat is that you clear only your throat, and getting rid of a pencil is just as futile because you don’t get rid of anything but the pencil.
“He really thinks the world of you, Mr. Kiplinger. They all do.”
“Yes, I know,” he muttered, thinking of the admiration he had once hoped for and comparing the dream with the reality. “They all do.”
“Every time your name came up Mr. Gimble said, ‘That Kiplinger, quite a guy!’ or something like that. I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this, Mr. Kiplinger but I always say that flattery isn’t worth a darn if the person being flattered doesn’t know about it. Don’t you agree?”
He nodded, because nodding was easier than saying something like, “Insinuation is the sincerest form of flattery,” and watching the blank look that would come to her face.
“Oh, yes,” she went on, “I almost forgot the most important thing of all: Mr. Saxon told me to be sure to ask you to do a sketch of me. He told me all about your career as a scenic designer and how you studied art in Paris when you were a boy and how you once had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and still loved to do sketches of your friends even though your work here in Hollywood no longer had anything to do with art. And he made me repeat one sentence over and over so I wouldn’t forget it when I got here: ‘Ferdie Saxon says he thinks I would make a wonderful subject for you.’ That was it.”
Kiplinger heard the chuckle—Miss Delmar’s chuckle. He had heard it so many times before. It was not a chuckle of mirth or derision. Rather it was a chuckle of admiration and respect, a small pat of applause for a reputation that was transcontinental and that perpetually enhanced itself, like a self-winding clock.
“I certainly do agree with them. You’re a perfect subject,” he said, a little more loudly than was necessary, for Miss Delmar’s desk was only a few feet off the entrance to his private sanctum. “And just to show you that I mean what I say, I’m going to do your portrait for you this very evening. That is, unless you’re busy and—”
“No, not at all, I’d love to,” she said eagerly.
“All right then, just as soon as we’ve had a bite to eat we’ll go over to my hotel. …”
“Your hotel?”
“I know. I know. You don’t understand why I’m living in a hotel instead of in a palace in Beverly Hills, but, honey, the servant problem is not just something we thought up as a good topic for bad films. The light here in my office happens to be very poor, so I keep all my drawing equipment over at my hotel.”
“I … see,” the girl said very slowly, and he knew that at last she did see. “Well, really, I don’t think I ought to put you to all that bother, Mr. Kiplinger, and to tell you the truth—”
“Unh, unh, remember now, honey, you’re in Hollywood. Absolutely no telling of the truth permitted. So not another word. It’s settled.”
He was not looking directly at her. He did not want to see frightened blue eyes. He was looking out through the entrance to his office, across the anteroom, to the glass panes of the modernistic bookcase against the wall. Miss Delmar was at her observation post. He hadn’t doubted that for a moment. From her desk, she could watch the bookcase and see a reflection of everything that went on in his office. It gave her a visual movie to go with the sound track. It was vital that Miss Delmar enjoy the movies he put on for her.
“I think I’d like to do you in water colors,” he said. “I hardly think crayon or charcoal would do justice to your lovely hair or to those eyes.”
She blushed, and he wondered if Miss Delmar’s movie was in Technicolor, and for a moment he thought of all the sketches he had done in the years since he had left the work he loved because he had feared being a failure at it, to wind up eventually as a producer of inferior motion pictures. Dozens of bad films and dozens of sketches, and it was the sketches that had counted.
A few of them hung in the foyer of his suite at the hotel. But most of them had been given to their subjects and thus put back in circulation where they could do the most good for their creator—the framed fait accompli, the diploma on the wall, the testimonial not to the art of Rob Kiplinger but to the genius that made him or rather allowed him to be, what he was. That Kiplinger. What a guy. His motion pictures stink but did you hear about the time he …
He held out his hands and said, “Come here.”
She got up and walked around the huge desk to his chair and he took both her hands and drew her toward him. He looked toward the bookcase for a moment and then he said, “You’re a damned lovely kid, do you know it? Come here.” He drew her head down and kissed her quickly on the lips. “Sit down over there and listen to me do something nice for you.”
She did not say anything, but by the time she had reached the sofa, he could see that she had managed to bring back a smile to her face, and she said, with too much composure, “You’re a dear, Mr. Kiplinger.”
He called Miss Delmar in. The chuckle was now the trace of a smile. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kiplinger,” she said, “but did you call me?”
“Get me Spindell on the phone,” he said, “and on the way out would you be good enough to close the door?” He had let her see enough of this particular picture. A scene or two was always sufficient. It was wonderful how you could always count on people without any imagination to do a lot of imagining. As soon as he left, she would call Harry Lyons’ secretary, and Lyons’ secretary would call that idiot over at Paramount, and on it would go until it became a feature-length film … perhaps, by the time it got back to him wrapped up neatly in applause, a double feature. That Kiplinger. I’m … telling … you.
The extension rang and he picked up the phone. “Max? Rob Kiplinger. … Swell, tootsie, swell. … Max, I … No, I mean it, Max, I don’t usually go overboard for farce comedy but this time … Yes, Max, a very lovely job. … Max, I have a girl sitting here next to me, name is Janice Barker … That’s right. … You haven’t, huh? Well, then you haven’t been reading the papers, tootsie, and you haven’t been watching that TV screen like you should. She’s been all over the place, and not just good, but great, and why should I tell you how beautiful she is when you’ll see that for yourself? … Just what you’ve been looking for, Max. … Of course I’ve seen her. … Sure. … I caught her in a show last year in Boston when I was … What? … (What was the name of that show, honey?)…”
“Louder and Funnier,” she said eagerly.
“Louder and Funnier, Max. … That’s right. … My idea was, give her a stock contract to start, put her through the works and let her carry the ball from there. … What? … Well, what do you think? You oughta know better than to ask that. … Sure … in water colors, too. … Uh huh. … Swell, that’s fine. … (Take this down, honey.)… Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. … Through Gate 3. … Ask for Miss Trueman. … Max, I love you. … Thank you, baby.”
“Oh, Mr. Kiplinger,” the girl squealed when he had hung up. “Ferdie Saxon was right. You are wonderful!”
“You don’t have to worry about a thing now, honey,” he said, without smiling. “Just look pretty, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, keep your ears open till you find out who’s important and who’s just acting important, and you’re in. And if you don’t follow my advice, that won’t matter either, because Max Spindell doesn’t know how to say ‘no’ to me.”
She laughed a little hysterically and said, “I know this sounds silly, but really how can I ever thank you?”
The door was closed, so Kiplinger just looked at her and said, “The first thing you can do is drag me out of this office.”
They stepped out into the anteroom.
“I’m leaving now,” he said to Miss Delmar, who tried, with little success, to take her eyes off the girl. “I had a tentative engagement with Lester Stiles for dinner to night. If he calls, tell him how sorry I am that I can’t make it. I’ll be at the hotel all evening if he wants to call me. But only if it’s urgent. I’ll leave that to you, Miss Delmar.”
He took the girl’s arm as they walked out, and he could hear Miss Delmar dialing her phone before he was half way down the corridor to the elevator, and without ever having heard her personal calls he was certain he knew what she’d be saying, for a producer can be a hero to his own secretary if he’s the wrong kind of man and she’s the right kind of secretary.
“Mr. Kiplinger,” the girl was saying, “I really don’t want you to break your dinner date and go to all this trouble just for me. Honestly.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” was all he said, though what he might have said was, don’t talk nonsense, I had no date with Lester Stiles. … I haven’t spoken to him in four weeks, and he is, this very minute, three thousand miles from here, in all probability having dinner at Lindy’s. …
Outside, the early evening air was toying with the idea of fireplaces and extra blankets, and Kiplinger stood with the girl for a moment before the entrance to the sprawling white building until Harry Davis, who drove one of the studio limousines, spotted them and pulled up to the curb. Harry had once been a studio stunt man and had gone over a cliff on a motorcycle once too often. And so now he clung to the payroll as semiprivate chauffeur to a favored few at the studio and there was a tacit understanding that he was to endure the agony of using his legs to jump out and open the door only for Max Spindell.
He tipped his cap, turned the scar tissue of his face toward the girl, smiled happily and said, “Evening, Chief. To the hotel?”
Kiplinger said, “No, Harry, Romanoff’s,” and Harry’s smile collapsed. Kiplinger added, “We’ll go there first.” The smile returned.
The girl was staring silently out of the window, and finally Kiplinger said, “Does that sound all right to you, honey? A few martoonies … a little chatter … early dinner … and then up to my place to get that pretty little nose of yours down on paper. …”
“That sounds fine to me, Mr. Kiplinger. I’d love to,” he heard her say to the window, but he did not analyze the tone of her voice too carefully, nor did he look right at her as she spoke. For he was afraid that she’d turn toward him and he’d have to look into her eyes so instead he watched Harry adjusting the rear-view mirror to go with the sound track. …
They sat at a table near the door and ordered drinks, and everyone who walked past the table looked first at the girl, then at Kiplinger, then back to the girl, and many whom Kiplinger knew only casually, and who usually had nothing to say to him, came over to the table and said it.
“Is there anyone you don’t know?” the girl asked. “Is it always like this?”
“Not always,” he said, thinking: It won’t be like this the day after they preview The Velvet Glove in Pasadena. It wasn’t like this for two whole weeks after Wherever You Are was reviewed in the trades. It wasn’t like this last night, either. Last night he had dined alone.
One martini was enough to de-ice her, and during dinner she told him of a young man named Larry who wrote unsuccessful popular music and who had asked her three times to marry him, and she spoke of him just as though she were not fond of him and Kiplinger knew it was because she thought he would like that, and all the time, though he was listening to her, he was thinking only that she was painfully beautiful and ridiculously young and that if she stopped talking for a moment she would probably feel like crying. And it did not make him feel any better to know that he would not blame her.
Sam Winston sat down at their table, swallowed two aspirin tablets, and asked Kiplinger to tell him something funny for the column—but he did not look at Kiplinger as Kiplinger recited a few anecdotes, and when he left he had not taken down a word. A British, second-malelead came over and was charming and drunk, and a visiting Broadway producer was honest and said simply, “I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Barker,” but he let slip a few inappropriate Anglo-Saxonisms in talking with Kiplinger, so the girl excused herself from the table to powder her nose. Then Abner Good, a small, scholarly looking man, ambled over.
“Rob,” he said, “it’s nice to see you wallowing in this protoplasmic ooze again. Where you been? Gimme some thing on The Velvet Glove, anything you want. I’ll work it into Friday’s column.”
Kiplinger said, “Abner, I could tell you that it’s going to be a sleeper … a great psychological thriller with more hitch than Hitchcock. … But I won’t tell you that because you’ll know I’m lying, and besides you printed that last week. So let’s not waste time. Get out your pencil.”
Abner Good took out a small leather-bound pad and a little gold pencil. He wrote a Hollywood column for a New York racing paper and Broadway columnists appropriated his scoops regularly.
“Her name is Janice Barker,” Kiplinger said. “B-a-r k-e-r. Actress, nineteen, will be signed by Spindell tomorrow. I met her this afternoon.” He watched Good scribble on the pad.
Good looked up at him. “And?”
“And what?” said Kiplinger, as though he didn’t know.
“And?” said Good.
“And I promised her I’d do her portrait for her tonight. After dinner.”
Abner Good smiled at his pad. He put it back carefully in his pocket and said, “Thanks, Rob.” Kiplinger watched him walk away and he wondered whether Ferdie Saxon would be the first to mail him the clipping.
When the girl returned to the table with fresh makeup and each hair in place, he called the waiter.
“I’m leaving, Paul,” he said to the smiling white teeth, “but I was expecting a call here from a Mr. Nick Grandy. Would you please tell the switchboard operator that if anyone by that name calls for me, I’ll be at my hotel all evening. She has the number. Remember that— Nick Grandy … my hotel.”
“You bet, Mr. Kiplinger, I certainly will do that,” said the bright teeth. Kiplinger walked out, holding the girl by the arm, and pretended not to see Paul whispering to one of the captains, and he thought what a wonderful joke it would be if Nick Grandy called him at Romanoff’s that night, because he did not know a Nick Grandy.
The limousine was waiting for them.
“I got back just in time,” Harry explained as they stepped in. “You know them two wise guy actors, the funny fellahs what’s always makin’ trouble on the lot? Well, tonight, they’re so knocked out from playin’ touch football all day I hadda lug ‘em over to the Turkish baths. But I got back in time, hey, Chief? Leave it to Harry. The hotel, Chief?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I says to myself, Mr. Kiplinger’ll be wantin’ me in an hour or so, so I hustle them two guys out there in a hurry and beat it back just—”
“I’m glad you did,” Kiplinger said. Harry knew practically everyone in the industry and he had a big mouth. “You’re a good man, Harry.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said Harry, adjusting the mirror.
After they had gone several blocks in silence, Kiplinger finally asked the girl, “Happy?”
And she said, “Of course.”
He looked out of the window at the far-off lights twinkling up in the hills, for there was no place else to look except at the girl or at the back of Harry’s head, which was at alert attention, or at Harry’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. So he looked out of the window and wondered whether it was really true that Harry knew more about what went on at the studios than Louella Parsons, and then they were pulling into the driveway, past the wide green lawns, now decolored by the darkness, up to the entrance of the hotel.
“This is it, Chief,” said Harry. “Twelve minutes flat, and I coulda done it in ten if that shomiss wasn’t giving me the hawk-eye when I was gettin’ set to jump the light.”
“Nice work, Harry,” Kiplinger said, handing him a ten-dollar bill as they got out. “Buy the wife a new mink coat.”
“You bet, boss. Much obliged.” He grinned once more at the girl, and then he drove off.
They stood on the walk before the hotel until the car was out of sight, and then Kiplinger turned suddenly to the girl and took hold of her hands and he didn’t mind now that they were cold.
“Honey,” he said, smiling, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
She laughed a little nervously. “I’m afraid I don’t quite get it. Thank me for what?”
“Oh … let’s just say … for walking into my office this afternoon, for having dinner with me tonight, for sitting at my table, for riding by my side in Harry’s limousine … for coming here …”
It was too dark to be certain, but he imagined that her eyes were more bewildered than frightened.
He said, “You did enjoy yourself, didn’t you?”
And she said, “Well, yes, Mr. Kiplinger, of course.”
“And you did want to get into pictures more than anything else in the world, didn’t you?”
“Why … yes … and you don’t know how grateful I am, really. I—”
“Oh, but I do, honey,” he said. “I certainly do. You told me yourself. You said that you once told Ferdie Saxon you’d do anything to get into pictures.”
She looked away, and he said, “You know something? I was that way once myself. I wanted something very badly. That is, there was a somebody I wanted to be. Well, for a while I was young enough and stupid enough to think I was going to get where I wanted, and then I found out it just wasn’t going to be. So I made up my mind I’d do anything to get there. And you know what? I got there. Only, I found out something that no one ever told me: getting what you want isn’t worth a damn unless the way that you get it is good. And holding onto it is even worse. …”
“Don’t … Please …” she blurted out. He wouldn’t know if there were tears in her eyes. It was so long since he had seen anything but glycerine. “Mr. Kiplinger, I—”
“No, let me finish,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you are going to be given a small job in pictures. It won’t be much, but it’ll be a beginning. Whether you get anywhere, or lose out, will be entirely up to you. You are beautiful, but out here that’s nothing. If you also have talent, or good luck, you will get where you want. But I want you to promise me something.”
“All right,” she said, in a very small voice.
“I want you to promise me that if you turn out to be without talent or good luck, you will fail.”
She smiled and said, “I promise.”
“Good,” he said. “And now that I’ve gotten you a low-paying, nerve-racking job with a talentless studio run by a barbarian named Max Spindell and have exposed you to an evening of brilliant boredom, topped off by my own Grade B speech, I am going to ask you to do me a favor. That is, I want you to keep a deep, dark secret for me. Every girl I’ve ever asked to keep a secret has managed to do it.” He walked her over to a cab parked in the driveway. “Be at Spindell’s office at ten sharp. Miss Trueman likes people who are punctual. Get plenty of sleep tonight. Wear your hair loose, the way you’re wearing it now, and for Pete’s sake, smile when you walk in.”
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to the cab.
“That’s your cab home,” he said. He opened the door.
“Go on, honey. … In.”
She got in the back seat and held the door open. “But … but I thought there was a secret? And aren’t you going to do my portrait? I thought …”
“Sure, I’m going to do your picture. I always do.”
“But how—?”
“That’s the secret, honey, and all I ask is that you please be good to it.” He shut the door and looked down at her through the open window. “I’m going to do your portrait from memory,” he said. “Just like I’ve done them all. From memory.”
He looked into her eyes and they were smiling now with the rest of her face and she was even more beautiful than he had thought.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” he said.
And she said, “Yes, Mr. Kiplinger, I believe you,” and somehow he felt that she really did and he was glad that she did, though he knew that it did not matter one way or another.
He said, “One more thing, honey. If your friend Larry asks you a fourth time, why don’t you say yes while the music he’s writing is still bad? Think about it, will you?”
He started walking away, and she called to him: “It’s a deal.”
He walked through the lobby to the elevator, and already he was thinking of what brush he would use and what colors he would mix for her hair and how he would capture her eyes as they had been a moment ago. He was no longer tired, and he had an idea this was going to be a good one, perhaps even better than any of the others— and they had been fine jobs, too. And as he went up in the elevator he thought how nice it would be to stay in his apartment for weeks—no, forever—and do nothing but paint, but he knew that that would never be, so he started thinking of the note of appreciation to Ferdie Saxon that he would dictate in the morning, and how Miss Delmar would be able to thrive on it for days, and how he would have nothing to worry about now until The Velvet Glove was released, and how even then he would not have to worry because by then there would be another wonderful subject walking in. …