THE “TERRIBLE WOMAN NAMED Martin” was on the telephone when Thorn arrived at his borrowed office on Monday morning. It was the fourth time she had called him, and his usual fund of patience with people who were offering money to Gregory was running very thin. Besides, he was in no mood to cope with terrible people offering anything; he had enough problems for a Monday morning as it was. Gregory, who was still too ill yesterday to go to Jill Goodwyn’s luncheon party, had insisted on reporting for work today and would no doubt end up in hospital for the rest of his contract. And at breakfast, Cindy had treated him to a masterly tirade on the subject of Hollywood gossip, and the subtle difference between admiring your hostess and openly groveling before her at the edge of a swimming pool all afternoon while twenty famous people watched you.
Thornton picked up the telephone lifelessly. “Good morning, Mrs. Martin.”
“It’s me again, Mr. Johns,” she said brightly. “Helene Martin, of the Hollywood ‘Friends of Books.’”
“Yes. Good morning.”
“It’s just that I’ve talked with the Vice-President and the Treasurer, and they think we could make it five hundred instead.”
Thorn’s fund of patience grew larger. Not that Gregory would lecture anyway but one kind of finesse was called for at one level of finance and another at another. The two-hundred level, he thought, as Mrs. Martin went on talking, and the five-hundred. The two-hundred block and the five-hundred.
“So, with this emergency,” Mrs. Martin was saying, “if I could just come up and see you personally, I could at least report I’d left no stone unturned.”
“Well, then,” Thorn said graciously, “if it’ll make you feel any better, come up and turn some stones tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I’m right in the neighborhood this very minute and—well, you see, the meeting is day after tomorrow, and it is my first year as President of ‘Friends of Books’ and—”
Twenty minutes later she was being shown in, and as Thorn rose to greet her, he wondered why she should need to be so ardent a clubwoman. She was no Jill Goodwyn, but she wasn’t a Hokinson either. She was slender and Thorn’s eye told him that her heavy linen suit came from no budget basement. She was fortyish but, he thought quickly, who isn’t? Even Jill Goodwyn, so delicately young on the screen, was, at a swimming pool in brilliant sunlight—
“So we decided to go as high as five hundred,” Mrs. Martin was explaining rapidly. “Why, for a half hour’s talk, that’s awfully high pay.”
“A half-hour?”
“Well, I’ll put all my cards on the table.” She tossed her head defiantly. “It’s our tenth anniversary, and we had a cancellation, and all the famous authors out here now are booked solid this whole week. So we’re really stuck. It’s awful to be stuck for your tenth anniversary.”
“Yes, it is.” Thornton Johns shook his head in sympathy.
“And it would be such an easy lecture—you know, not politics or anything he’d have to write out first. It’s the personal little things, like where he gets his ideas and how he started writing and what hours he writes best, and all.”
Just then Josh MacQuade opened the door, paused, said, “Sorry,” and started to back away.
“Come on in, Josh,” Thorn called and proceeded with introductions. To MacQuade, Mrs. Martin recapitulated her arguments so winningly that Thorn suffered with her when Josh said, almost coldly, “It’s too bad Gregory Johns is so set against public appearances, but even the studio isn’t trying to pressure him.”
“It is too bad,” Thorn echoed, but with a kindly tone. “And especially because he could tell you just the sort of thing you want. Reams of it. Why, when he was nine or so he started his first book—writing one himself I mean. It was the damnedest plagiarism you ever heard of.” Thorn smiled reminiscently, and the others smiled with him. “The kid lifted not just one plot from one book, but all the plots and all the characters of the entire printed works of Ralph Henry Barbour.”
“Oh, how darling,” Mrs. Martin said. “Who was Ralph Henry—”
“And one day,” Thorn went on, warming up to a responsive audience just as he did at the Premium Club, “one day when he was around thirteen or fourteen, he up and departed for New York City—all alone, mind you, this shy gawk of a kid who’d never been anywhere.”
The visit to the editor hypnotized Mrs. Martin. In desperate supplication she begged, “Can’t you persuade him, can’t you possibly persuade him?” She turned to Josh. “Mr. MacQuade, couldn’t you persuade him? This is just the sort of thing we’d love!”
“They’re nice yarns, all right,” Josh MacQuade said. He was watching Thorn almost as intently as Mrs. Martin was.
“And the press,” she continued to MacQuade, “does cover our author lunches when they’re this important.”
“And there’s one other story,” Thornton said, ignoring the small exchange between the two. “It hasn’t a thing to do with writing, but it’s my favorite story about my brother, just the same.” In anticipation he laughed outright, throwing his head back. His magnificent teeth, not one marred by a filling, inlay, or crown, were all revealed, and his laughter was so loving, so contagious, that Josh and Mrs. Martin laughed too.
“Tell us,” Mrs. Martin urged. “Please!”
“It was at a birthday party of mine, my, let’s see, fifteenth, no, sixteenth birthday party. I had a girl named Janie Hyatt—my first girl—and it was a real grown-up affair. You can imagine how grown-up. Well, all of a sudden, out of the blue—”
Thorn mimicked the piping of a little boy’s voice and collapsed, sputtering, while Josh and Mrs. Martin roared. “Going to have a puppy—” Thorn said once more in a dying whisper, and all three laughed again.
“Oh, I could weep,” Mrs. Martin cried. “They’re wonderful stories, and you make them so wonderful, the way you tell them!”
“I’ve got a million of them.”
Mrs. Martin’s face went tragic. “I could die,” she said. “I can’t bear to go back empty-handed, now that I have heard them.” She looked at Thorn wistfully. “I wish you were your brother. I wonder if you—”
She paused and silence fell upon the room. Josh decided that the look on the face of Thornton Johns was the innocent pleasure of a child who has been good and knows it. I wonder, MacQuade thought, if he knew he was going to put it into her mind, or whether blind instinct guides him.
“You wonder if I what?” Thorn asked Mrs. Martin.
“I can’t help wondering,” she said in a rush, “if you would address our meeting. You could tell us about your brother.”
“Me?”
“Why not?” Mrs. Martin said ecstatically. “People often lecture about authors.”
“Horn in on Gregory? Thanks, no.” Thorn spoke indignantly, but his eyes sought MacQuade’s.
“Horning in? You’re being invited on your own. Begged, implored. I could go back and say, well, Mr. Gregory Johns never does, but his good-looking—his clever brother—” She wheeled toward MacQuade. “It’s a new angle, isn’t it, Mr. MacQuade? An author who won’t lecture and a brother who—”
“It is a publicity gimmick,” MacQuade said. His eyes were still on Thornton’s face.
“Oh, it is. I know Louella personally. I’m sure I could get her to come to something so different from regular author-lectures.”
“We’d notify all the papers,” said MacQuade, looking at Thorn judiciously, “as we always do. It might get a big play in the columns.”
“And the fee,” Mrs. Martin said archly at Thornton, “would be yours.”
Thornton Johns rose and began to walk aimlessly about. “I’m sure Gregory would forbid it anyway,” he said. A dubious note in his own voice surprised him. Could Gregory really forbid him the chance to make five hundred dollars for himself, when Gregory must realize that a lot of cash was going right out of Cindy’s and his pockets, despite Gregory’s idea that he was treating them to everything? What about all the extra clothes they had had to get for this trip? The meals at Romanoff’s and LaRue’s that Gregory and Abby knew nothing about? The thank-you orchid sprays for Peg Von Brann and Jill Goodwyn? Gregory didn’t even know that things like that were proper. It always cost you money when people invited you on trips as their guests, and it was only right that if you could defray your extra expenses in a perfectly honorable way, and perhaps get valuable publicity at the same time for the book and the picture—
“Couldn’t you ask your brother?” Mrs. Martin said at last.
“I might talk it over tonight.”
“Oh, no, I’d have to know right away.” Once more Thorn looked at Josh MacQuade. MacQuade nodded. Reluctantly Thorn said, “If Josh here insists—”
Jill Goodwyn was in the audience, and for a moment Thornton Johns came closer to queasy panic than he ever had before in all his forty-three years. He had been calm enough when he saw Cindy and Abby and Peg Von Brann and Kitty MacQuade, but Jill Goodwyn’s entrance had unnerved him as much as it had thrilled the whole roomful of twittering women. He had scarcely tasted his food, and now as he sat on the platform between President Martin and Vice-President. Black, he watched the assembled ladies fuss with demitasses and lipsticks and mirrors and wished to Heaven that he had never used the five-hundred clincher on Gregory. More passionately he wished he had not blabbed to Jill Goodwyn when she had phoned about his spray of orchids. But blab he did—complete with the date and street address and, for all he knew now, the zone number. What modest man would have guessed that she would quit the set in the middle of the day while a million-dollar production sat around waiting?
Thornton Johns forced himself to look at Cindy. At her side, Abby was smiling and talking, but Cindy, was ignoring her and doing what everybody around her was doing—watching Jill Goodwyn. Unlike everybody else, Cindy showed no sign of pleasure in doing so. Mrs. Martin rose and stepped forward. As she concluded her introductions and stood nodding at him, a burst of applause filled the room and Thornton Johns suddenly remembered that he was on a raised platform, looking down at upturned and expectant faces. His panic fled. He got up slowly, bowed to Vice-President Black, shook hands cordially with President Martin, and went forward to the lectern. It was breast-high and cut the effect of his six-foot-three. He frowned at it, shook his head, stepped around it, and smiled happily at his audience.
“Ladies and—” He paused and looked about once more. If there was a single man in the place besides himself and the waiters, that man was hiding under a table. “Ladies,” he concluded and grinned.
A soft rippling washed over the room. “Ladies and ladies,” somebody whispered loudly. “Isn’t that darling!”
Thorn waited for another fraction of time. “Your chairman didn’t give you any title for this small talk of mine, and for an excellent reason. She didn’t know it. The reason she didn’t is that until a minute ago I didn’t know it. When she coaxed me into speaking to you today, as a poor substitute for my brother, whom all of you really wanted to hear, I began to make notes about what seemed most important. To my dismay, all my notes were about me!”
Now the sound was louder. Palm of my hand already, Thorn thought. These babies will take anything.
“So I tossed those notes in the garbage can and started all over. The second time I did manage to squeeze my famous brother in—in fact all these notes”—he waved a single card in the air—“are about him and nobody else. As I glanced through them just now, the right title for this little talk, the only fitting title, popped into my head. I’m calling it, simply, ‘My Brother, Gregory Johns.’”
He said this so modestly, but with so engaging a smile of triumph for having hit upon it, that once again there was the : buzz of whispering, of pleasure experienced and pleasure anticipated.
“Now, your President says you want me to tell you what started my brother writing. That’s one thing I can’t do, but I can tell you when he started and that takes us all back thirty years. My brother Gregory was nine then, and crazy about some books by Ralph Henry Barbour or Barber, or however B-a-r-b-o-u-r is supposed to be pronounced. Does anybody know for sure?”
Thorn paused and looked around appealingly. A cross-hatched sound of Barbour and Barber arose from the tables in a demonstration of audience participation that told him the babies would not only take but give. He had to gesture for silence before he could go on. The word “plagiarism,” he knew, would bring the house down, and when he reached it, he spoke it almost in a whisper.
“But luckily, Mr. Barbour or Barber never heard about my brother’s wholesale crime, so Gregory was never hauled up before the Authors Guild or the courts. I have noticed, though, that to this day a plagiarism case in the daily newspaper gets to him in a mighty peculiar way. He reads every word, goes livid with rage, and for the next week hides his manuscript even from his own mother.”
As he again waited for silence, Thorn let his eyes wander to the tables reserved for the press. Its concerted gaze was upon him, a wary gaze, estimating, judging. His heart sank. These hard-boiled professionals were hold-outs; they were finding his speech a shade less newsworthy than they were supposed to. They might give it and Gregory and the book no more than a buried line or so!
At this horrid notion, a deep necessity within Thornton Johns abruptly gave birth to a reckless invention. Turning squarely toward Jill Goodwyn, and finding her eyes on him, he deliberately blew her a kiss. In instant response, she blew one back at him, her arm describing a great arc as she did so. Then clasping both her famous hands high above the table, she gave him the gesture of public congratulation and accolade.
A small gasp went up from most of the assembled ladies, and a sudden activity possessed the pencils of the press. In an effervescence of delight and regret, Thornton Johns told himself he shouldn’t have done it. It was folly—and not only because of Cindy, whose presence in the room he had momentarily forgotten. This was not the sort of thing one wanted in print, especially magnified and distorted, as it would be bound to be. Is Jill Goodwyn starting a new romance with a visiting New Yorker? Visiting New Yorker? Hell, they’d probably put his name in.
Thornton Johns found himself suddenly cheered. He went on with his lecture and knew he was surpassing himself. By the time the long-ago puppy was putting in his scheduled appearance, another kind of regret bubbled up in Thornton Johns. His brief half-hour on the stage was drawing inexorably to a close.
“For a non-pressagent,” Josh MacQuade said to Harry Von Brann the following Monday afternoon, “Thornton Johns does very well indeed.” As he spoke, he set an armful of beautifully mounted news clippings and pictures on the long mahogany table at one side of Von Brann’s office.
“Very well indeed for the book, or the picture, or Thornton Johns?” Von Brann asked.
“All three,” MacQuade said. “God knows the book and the studio are getting a huge play—no matter how much of it sticks to G. Thornton Johns en route.”
“What’s the G stand for?”‘
“Gerald, for his father. Now that he’s entered public life, he’s going to drop the G officially. When he told me, I remarked offhandedly, ‘Bernard Shaw did,’ and he didn’t get sore. He just nodded and said, ‘I know it.’”
Both men laughed. Von Brann was past fifty, with an almost bald skull, a trim goatee, and a hint of sideburns. It was one of his characteristics never to let himself seem harassed or even very busy. “No coronaries or ulcers for me, thanks,” he would say. “If you’re any good at your job, you don’t have to have them.” This made him widely unpopular with other producers but he did not mind. Nothing mattered to him but his work, his children, and his wife. In that order.
Now he said, “Peg says Thornton is very good on a platform, not just handsome. ‘The right mixture of syrup and sass,’ she said, ‘to panic a ladies’ club.’” .
“I’ll say he’s good. The day after that little performance of his, he got himself signed up for two more, one next week, and one the last week they’re here. I don’t see why the hell you don’t can me and hire Thornton Johns.”
Von Brann shrugged. “On the rest of our properties, he mightn’t put his heart and soul and sacred honor into it.”
“That’s the damnedest part of it. Everything he does or says is focused on Gregory.”
“The kiss,” said Von Brann quickly, “wasn’t.” He crossed the room to examine the publicity. The Sunday papers had taken up lavishly where the dailies had left off and the dailies had been lavish enough. Two papers had large pictures of Thornton Johns, one alone and one with Cindy, who had managed to look as smiling and proud for the photographers as a contented wife should. In adjacent columns were larger pictures of Jill Goodwyn, who looked smiling and proud and not contented at all.
“I wish,” Von Brann said, “that he’d blown his kiss at an Imperial Century star, that’s all.”
“Give him another week.”
“He’s giving me another week. He wants me to buy any or all of Gregory’s earlier books, or let him offer them to Dore or Darryl next Monday.”
“Are they any good?”
“Partial Eclipse might make a picture. The synopsis came down yesterday.”
“He’ll sell all of them,” MacQuade said glumly.
“Not if this damn slump keeps up, he won’t. Nineteen more theaters closed last week.”
“Give him time. That one could talk his way right through a national depression.”
“I thought you were so keen about him,” Von Brann said, returning to his desk.
“I was. I am. But God, the man’s changing by the minute. He grabs off everything in sight—last Friday he damn near got me to take out more life insurance, through him. I bet if he cuts a finger, hot brass comes out, and he’s becoming so damn calculating, you see logarithms when you look at him.”
Von Brann laughed lazily. “I wonder how Gregory’s taking all that.” He nodded to the table.
“I asked Hy, and Hy said that Gregory just clammed up after the lecture and is still clammed up.”
A buzzer sounded and the intercom on the desk nasally told Von Brann that Mr. Bernstein was on One One Three. He pressed a button on the single telephone instrument before him, picked up the receiver, and said, “Yes, Hy?”
“Could we see you? Gregory’s got a notion for that airplane argument—maybe it will play this way.”
“Come on in. How’s he feeling?”
“Pretty rotten, like the start of last week, but he’s in.”
“Did you put him on to my man, Hy? Goodman’s the only doctor in town is any good with these recurrent cases.”
“Gregory says he’s leery of fancy doctors.”
“Well, it’s too bad he had to miss Alice Cohen’s shindig Saturday night. It was a beaut.”
Through the receiver Hy’s laugh was audible all over the room.
“Virus P,” Hy said. “That’s what he’s got I’ve diagnosed it at last.”
“Virus T?”
“Not T. I said P. P as in Parties.”
Cindy had seen the Sunday papers while Thorn was still asleep. Her first impulse was to murder Thorn plus Jill Goodwyn plus William Randolph Hearst. Then the room service girl told her she “took just lovely,” and the waiter with her breakfast tray asked her how it felt to be famous. By eleven, she had had three phone calls, had accepted invitations to a luncheon party for herself and two dinner parties for herself and Thorn, and had given up all ideas of forcing Thorn to change his tactics. It was wrong to interfere with your husband’s career.
To be bitter and happy at the same time is no mean feat for the human heart, but long before Thorn was awake, Cindy was managing it nicely. She was sorry she had gone at him tooth and nail after the lecture, considered returning his penitential present of half the fee, and vetoed that notion as quixotic. She ordered additional stationery and twelve airmail stamps from the front desk, and called the newsstand for two extra copies of each paper, deciding it might be wiser to get the other copies she would need from newsstands on the street later on. “Now, Mother Johns,” she would write, “don’t go bragging all over Long Island about your other famous son.” She would write the boys, too, and the rest of the family. She wondered if Leonard Lyons or Walter Winchell ever saw the California papers, and wished Thorn hadn’t dropped postcards just yesterday to Oscar Hammerstein and Rex Stout. “Thought you’d liked to know I’ve taken to lecturing about world government and Gregory’s book out here,” the cards had said, but if they hadn’t gone off, the clippings could have been sent instead.
She looked at the papers once more. That old hag, she thought. Her face has been in the papers a million times, but mine is news. There was a knock at the door; she folded the papers quickly, picked up a magazine, and called, “Come in.”
It was a bellhop with the stationery, stamps, and extra papers. He also had a package for which he asked her to sign. “It came last night,” he said. “There was a mix-up downstairs.” He threw her a shy glance and looked away. She gave him a dollar, and as he started to get change, waved her hand graciously and turned aside.
The package was heavy and addressed merely Johns, with the name of the hotel. She opened it and wondered when Thorn had found time to go to a bookstore or when he expected to read. Not only did he attend to Gregory’s mail, phone calls, and requests for donations, not only did he collect and deposit Gregory’s weekly pay check, pay his bills, keep him supplied with pocket money, not only did he spend hours talking to people about Gregory’s old books—as if all this weren’t enough, Thorn also kept in almost daily touch with his own business in New York. That sinister-looking Diana Bates sent him a letter by every mail; every few days she wired or phoned about some client who was miffed by his absence. Miss Bates, Cindy thought, certainly believes in keeping in contact with the boss.
I wonder if he’s ever blown her a kiss. What do I mean “blown”?
It wouldn’t be a Diana, nor even a Jill Goodwyn, Cindy decided stonily, who could damage Thornton’s attitude toward home life permanently. But it could be women in the mass, all tittering over his darling jokes and looking up at him adoringly and clustering around asking questions afterward, until the janitor swept them out.
For a disloyal moment, Lucinda Johns wished her husband had never mounted that platform, or that he had proved a dud once he had. She glanced at the folded newspapers and was instantly cleansed of this treachery, but she gave rapid thanks that there were only two more lectures to come. She had asked if he were going to make the next two different in any way, and he had replied, “If you have a hit show, why search for new lyrics?” For one, the fee was only fifty dollars, but already he could no more have said “No” than a snowball could roll up a hill.
Snowball and hill, she thought wanly; he’d make a joke out of that and have them in the aisles. Well, once we’re home, he’ll be limited to the platform of the Premium Club. Talking to men about annuities and term insurance and liability, even Thorn can’t be so goddam darling.
Comforted, she turned her mind back to the package of books. There were a lot of them and she picked them up one by one. Joe Miller’s joke book, Chic Sale’s joke book, Bob Hope’s joke book, two books, by Bennett Cerf and two by John Mason Brown.
“No!” exclaimed Cindy aloud, and hurled John Mason Brown halfway across the room.