WHEN THE SUN BEGAN to sink down behind the squat, ugly architecture of downtown Los Angeles, I began to think of some way to spare myself another social session with Vince. I had sat out the previous evening with him in the Biltmore cocktail lounge, and though the hunting was as effortless as he had said, I wasn’t ready for in-discriminate mating yet. Beth’s bitter words were still in my head. Damn it, I was making a living. I wasn’t robbing anybody; the lies I told were just ordinary American business lies like everybody else’s lies. They didn’t do too much harm. What did she want of me? What was she being so goddam righteous about? If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a righteous woman. Of the hundreds and thousands of eligible and relatively willing females in the city of New York, why did I have to pick on a dame who wanted to elevate me? Because you wanted to elevate yourself, a small voice hiding in one of the creases of my mind answered. It wasn’t just her body that made me go for that New England stray. I liked to think so because it gave me less to worry about. But the first time I talked to her, I had a hunch that she wanted to elevate me, make me amount to something. It put me on my guard right away. I remember thinking there was something physically exciting about a girl who could be that pleasant to look at and still make so much sense. But I wanted her on my terms.
The first time I talked to Beth, all those numbers in the little phone books turned into dogs. They were nice dogs, pretty dogs, from Pomeranians to Russian wolfhounds, but I didn’t want them any more. I wanted Beth in a way I had never wanted any woman before. I wanted to enter not only into her body but into her mind, and the satisfaction of one seemed to intensify the satisfaction of the other. Beth gave me a sense of where I was and where I stood in time, and if my job with Nick was like a jail, a comfortable, cushy jail, but still a place of confinement, Beth was my contact with the outside world, who brought some of that world to me each visiting day. It was her world and, out here, it seemed as if it ought to be mine. Beth was my safety valve. And now the valve was shut. I was left to sweat in my own steam.
Vince came out of the bedroom, still in his pajamas. He had slept until one o’clock and then had his breakfast sent up. Now that the match was set, there wasn’t much for Vince to do until Miniff arrived and they got together to work out the fight. He had really caught the gravy train this time.
“You know I’ve been thinking…” he said.
“An obvious exaggeration,” I said.
“All right, wise guy,” he said. “But I didn’t get where I am with my beautiful body.”
“Where are you?” I said.
“In the Hotel Biltmore,” he said. “Room eight-o-one and two. Where the hell are you?”
“In limbo,” I said. “The Hotel Limbo. And I don’t even know the number of the room.”
“You’re working too hard,” Vince said.
“Well, between us I guess we do a day’s work,” I said.
“Don’t worry about this party.” Vince pointed to himself indignantly. “If I don’t take care of my end, all them fancy words of yours add up to double-o.” He took his pajama top off and bent his soft belly as he tried to touch his toes in a half-hearted gesture of calisthenics. “Jesus,” he said, “I’m slipping. Can’t even touch my toes any more.” He straightened up slowly and put his hands lewdly under his breasts, which were heavy with fat. “Stop staring at me, you naughty boy,” he camped in a falsetto and laughed.
“Go get some clothes on, goddam it,” I said. “This is an office. Anybody’s liable to come in.”
“I know what’s the matter with you, lover. You wanna keep me all to yourself.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “I want to keep you all to yourself.”
“All to myself,” Vince said. “My old man told me never to do that.”
“Go get your clothes on,” I said.
Vince hesitated and then decided to be friends. For the first time in his life he had a first-class ticket on a fast express and it might pay to get along with the other passengers. “Okay, chummo. I was only kiddin’.”
Vince retired to the bathroom. I had to get away from him. I thought of Stempel. I hadn’t bothered to get in touch with him yet because I didn’t know where he was any more. He had come out for MGM; I remembered that. So I called there and the girl who said “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” had never heard of him, but she passed me on to the one who said “writers” who told me that Stempel hadn’t worked there for several years. Then I thought I remembered having seen his name on a Warners’ picture and I called there. Yes, Mr. Stempel had worked there, but not in the last six months. Why didn’t I call the Screen Writers’ Guild? The Guild secretary had a record of every writer employed in Hollywood. I could reach Stempel at National, she said. National, it didn’t seem possible. The author of The Locomotive Dream, one of the bright young hopes of my generation, was employed by the studio that specialized in blood-and-thunder Westerns. For me it was almost like discovering that the writing credit on The Lone Ranger was Thomas Mann. But anyway I made the call. Yes, Mr. Stempel had been on the lot. “He was checked out this afternoon,” I was told. No, the Studio was not allowed to give out any personal numbers.
By this time I had to see Stempel. I had to find out what had happened to Stempel. In desperation I picked up the phone book, on the improbable chance that he might be listed. And there it was, easy as falling off the wagon, David H. Stempel, 1439 Stone Canyon Rd. CRestview 6-1101. One minute later I was talking to Stempel himself, his voice sounding exactly as high and boyish and enthusiastic as when I had seen him last.
“For God’s sake, Eddie Lewis! From what cloud bank have you descended? Hop in a cab and come on out here.”
As I taxied up through the streets of Los Angeles, which resembled small Middle-Western cities laid down side by side for miles and miles, I thought of Dave Stempel, David Heming Stempel, and what a demigod he had seemed back in the days when he was first reading his work in progress to us. David Heming Stempel could not have been better cast for a young epic poet if he had been picked out of the actors’ directory by an experienced casting director. He was a big man, well over six feet, with that rare combination of size and delicacy. His eyes were light blue, quick to smile and yet intense, and he had a long, slender profile.
After dropping out of school I didn’t see Dave again until I ran into him several years later, in Tim’s on Third Avenue. He was only a year or two out of college then and The Locomotive Dream had made him the most talked-of young poet in America. This had been the first volume of a trilogy he had planned on “Man’s inexorable struggle to conquer the Machine,” as the dust-jacket had put it, and the second volume, The Seven-Jewel Heart, had already been announced for “early publication.” That night, when I asked him what was new with him, he threw back that magnificent head of his and said, “You know I’ve always been curious to see what a real mythical kingdom looks like, so I’m going out to Hollywood for a couple of months. See if I can’t smuggle out a little of their mythical money. My projects have become an awful strain on those Guggenheims. So I thought it might be an amusing idea to let Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer provide me with a fellowship.”
That had been fifteen years ago. For half that time at least, Stempel’s publishers had continued to announce the “imminent publication” of The Seven-Jewel Heart. I know because I kept watching for it after having practically memorized The Locomotive Dream.
My cab turned in at a large medieval-looking stone house. A maid led me through the cold, high-ceilinged living room to a cosy paneled little bar which had nothing to do with the style of the house.
“Eddie Lewis,” Stempel said, as if our meeting had a real significance. “My Lord, you’ve changed, Eddie.”
My first impression of Dave was that he hadn’t changed at all. The face was still handsomely boyish, the figure tall and slender. The checkered tweed jacket and the polka-dot bow-tie accentuated his youthfulness. It was only when I looked at him more closely, while he shook the cocktails, that I began to see the little alterations time had made. His blond hair was going prematurely gray and thin and something had gone out of his eyes. As a young man he had been full of a bubbling, imaginative gaiety, but it seemed to me as he talked that this had been replaced by a nervous animation. We were reminiscing over the first drink, when Dave’s wife entered. I was ready to say hello again, for I had expected the highstrung little mental one with the boyish figure who had published a couple of thin books of verse herself and who had treated Dave with the respectful admiration one only accords to the dead. But this one was a very young woman with bangs, shoulder-length hair, exotic eyebrows, an abundance of Mexican handicraft silver jewelry, fleshy breasts with which she was obviously pleased and a manner that was more like a performance. She could have been a Hollywood stock-girl passing as an intellectual or an intellectual posing as a stock-girl.
“Miki, Eddie’s come out here with that giant prize-fighter we read about,” Dave said.
“I think that’s fascinating,” Miki said.
“Miki and I go to the fights every Friday night,” Dave said. “I love the rhythm of a good fight. I’ve seen them when they’re pure ballet.”
“What kind of a character is this giant?” Miki said, stealing a quick, approving glance at herself in the bar mirror as she talked. “It must be madly fascinating to study a person like that.”
“Madly,” I said.
The maid came in, looked at Mrs. Stempel significantly and went out again without a word. “Duck,” Mrs. Stempel said, “let’s go in to dinner.”
Duck and Mrs. Duck sat at either end of a long Spanish Colonial table in the large, formal dining room. After the avocado salad, the maid brought out a bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin and set it down in front of Dave with an air of formality. “Thank God I had the foresight to buy up all the Graves I could find,” he said as he uncorked the bottle expertly.
He poured a little into a wine glass and asked the maid to bring it down to Mrs. Stempel. He looked down the table at her, waiting for the verdict as she tasted the wine carefully.
“How is it?” he said.
“Not bad,” she decided. “Is this the Thirty-three?”
When he said it was, she nodded wisely. “I thought so. The Thirty-three has an extra little…” She paused as if reaching for exactly the right shade of meaning and I wondered if it would be nuance, or even bonne bouche, but she ended with “something.”
“It’s really the funniest thing,” Dave said. “I’ve been studying wines for, well, twenty years and this little minx of mine whose favorite drink when I met her was a lemon coke can tell one wine from another as if she’s been at it all her life.”
“I’ve just got a natural taste for it,” Miki admitted.
While Dave carved the meat, he said, “Oh, by the way, Miki, I talked to Mel Steiner today.”
“Oh,” Miki said, and stopped to wait for something that was obviously of great importance. “Well, what did he say?”
Dave turned to me and politely led me into the conversation. “You see, Eddie, there’s a little credit dispute on my last picture. A couple of writers who polished my script are trying to ease me out of screen credit. The way we settle these things now is by a Guild Arbitration committee. Steiner’s head of the committee.”
“Well, what did he say?” Miki pressed him.
“He says the committee hasn’t reached a final decision yet. Though it doesn’t look like I’m going to get screen-play credit. But I may get an adaptation credit.”
“That’s simply filthy,” Miki said, and then as a lady at a costume ball might do, she let her little pink mask of culture drop for a moment. “I think that stinks,” she announced.
“All they did was take my lines and rewrite them,” Dave said. “Making sure to take all the rhythm and the poetry out of them.”
“Additional dialogue, that’s what they should get,” Miki said, “additional dialogue.”
“You see, Eddie,” Dave explained, “to get screenplay credit, you’ve got to prove that you wrote at least twenty-five percent of the shooting script. So these credit-hounds always try to revise your script at least eighty percent. Writers with the souls of bookkeepers.”
The maid filled our glasses again.
“I suppose this is probably all Greek to you,” Dave apologized, “but these credits are our bread and butter. I spent nine months at Goldwyn’s last year on a script that got shelved, and had to take a salary cut at National. Now if I lose out on this credit, I’m in trouble.” A frown creased his high forehead. “Dammit, Miki, how many times do you have to tell that stupid wench not to go to sleep in the kitchen after she’s served the main course? You know how I hate to look at dirty dishes.”
“I know, duck,” Miki said. “She’s a Jukes on both sides of her family. But it’s so hard to get help to come all the way out here. They’re so independent these days.”
“What do they think this is, a free country?” I said, laughing to show I was making a little joke.
When the maid had removed the coffee cups sullenly and Dave was about to pour our second brandy, Miki said, very charmingly, “If your friend will excuse me. I’ll leave you boys alone. You probably have a lot to talk about.”
She went over and bit Dave playfully on the ear. “Good night, duck,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Lewis. Do come again soon. It’s been fascinating.”
There was pride in Dave’s washed-out blue eyes as her full, confident figure disappeared. “God, she’s a great woman,” he said. “Don’t you think she’s a great woman, Eddie?”
“Mm,” I said.
“I can’t take my eyes off her,” he said. “It’s been three years and I still can’t take my eyes off her. She’s given me something, Eddie, something I’ve been searching for all my life. Without Miki and Irving I would have been a schizo for sure.”
“Who is Irving?”
“Irving Seidel, my analyst. He’s a great man. He’s treated practically everybody I know.”
From one of the book-cases that completely covered the walls, Dave pulled out a volume and read a paragraph to me. It was a book by Seidel called, I Vs. Me. Dave’s library contained practically all the English, Russian and French classics, several shelves on psychoanalysis and most of the outstanding poetry and fiction of the past twenty years. And Dave’s mind seemed as curious and as hungry for new literary experiences as it had been fifteen years before. He quoted enthusiastically from a new Yale poet whose work, he said, reminded him “of a Marxist Gerard Manly Hopkins.” He described the subtle relationships in a first novel by a young Southern girl whose involuted style fascinated him. And then, pausing to inhale the fumes from his brandy glass, he began to recite a strange, haunting poem about two robots in a mechanized Utopia who are equipped with human hearts and discover the experience of love. At first it seemed to lack rhythm and form, and the sound of it grated on me, but gradually it began to shape itself into a pattern and its melodies were as unmistakable and provocative as the distorted, dissonant themes of Schoenberg.
When Dave paused to refill our brandy glasses, I said, “Never heard that before. What is it?”
“The prologue to The Seven-Jewel Heart,” Dave said.
“It’s—” I was going to say “fascinating” and then I remembered Miki. “It’s swell,” I said. “Have you ever finished it?”
Dave’s face was flushed and his eyes went in and out of focus. There had not been a great deal to drink but suddenly his powers of co-ordination seemed to switch off. “Almost finished,” he mumbled. “Jus’ one more canto. Thasall, jus’ one more canto. ’Fi c’d jus’ get this town off my back…” He shook his head slowly and began to recite again, unintelligibly.
“But why can’t you get out?” I said. “What holds you?”
“All I need is jus’ one good credit, an’ some o’ this gold. I need more gold, Eddie, and then I’ll—go to Mexico, six months, maybe a year, rediscover my soul, Eddie.”
“But Dave,” I said, “I can’t figure it. You’ve been making big dough for years. You must have enough to…ˮ
“This isn’t dough,” Dave said. “Dough sticks to your palms. This is a handful of worms that slip through your fingers. Know what this house cost me, Eddie? Five hundred dollars a month, six thousand dollars a year for this unspeakable abortion. And then Louise, a thousand a month, my fine for committing premeditated matrimony. And then there’s my daughter, Sandy, just starting at Wellesley, a lovely, intelligent girl whose mother refuses to let her contaminate herself by visiting her disreputable father but somehow brings herself to accept his disreputable lucre, a disreputable five thousand a year. And then there’s Wilbur, who is forty-one years old and who has finally decided what he wants to be—the brother of a Hollywood writer. One useless brother, three thousand per annum. And don’t let me forget my innocent-looking, white-haired mother-in-law with the cash register ringing in her brain, who stipulated a yearly retainer of five thousand dollars. These are the weeds, Eddie, that choke the life from the delicate, tender roots of the poetic impulse. The weeds, the weeeeeeeeds…” He drew it out into an eerie chant. “That feeds, and feeeeeeeeds…upon these poor creative seeds…”
I had to go. I had to be away from this. I needed a drink. No, I had a drink. That’s what I always thought I needed when I needed something else. I needed air. I needed to get out.
“Dave,” I said, “I gotta run. Gotta be up early in the morning. Lot to do.”
He begged me to stay, implored me to stay with such repetitious insistence that I felt the great bird had some nightmare fear of being left alone in this little cage. When I kept saying, “Gotta go now, Dave, gotta go,” he insisted on going along with me to help me find a cab. He staggered out into the night and walked me down to the boulevard. We waited under a lamppost on the corner, and as a cab pulled into the curb, Dave stood with his legs apart, swinging slowly back and forth, muttering, “Wanna hear my lates’, my very lates’ poem, jus’ written today, written on National’s precious time.”
His laugh mounted maniacally. As my cab pulled away, I could see him out of the rear window, lurching out of the glare of the lamplight back into the shadows of darkest Beverly Hills.
“Where ya wanna go?” The heavy, exasperated face of the cab driver turned to me.
“Biltmore,” I said.
“Can’t make it da Chicago Biltmore?” he said with angry humor.
“What’s the matter, you don’t like this town?” I said.
“You c’n have this town and seven points. Gimme Chi. Hacking in Chi you c’n make yourself a buck. The customers wantcha to live back in Chi. They leave ya real good tips.”
Furiously he shot the cab into high. I was sorry for him. I was sorry for everybody, when you got right down to it. I was sorry for David Heming Stempel. I was sorry for Eddie Lewis. I don’t want to be a little sad at forty, and sadder at fifty and a tragic bum at sixty. What was it Beth said: Some day, two words for an epitaph. Who said that? Beth said that. Beth had the courage of her convictions. Why didn’t I call Beth? Why didn’t I marry Beth? Hello, darling, just wanted to call and let you know I’m getting out of this racket. That’s right, not even going back to the training camp. Yeah, I finally did it, made up my mind, rediscovered my poet’s soul, no—that’s Stempel. Rediscovered something anyway. Coming back on the next train, darling, coming back to you, and by the way, Beth, will you marry me?
I tipped the cab driver from Chi a dollar to brighten his evening and hurried into the lobby to place my call. Person-to-person to Miss Beth Reynolds, R as in righteous, E as in elevate, Y as in yearning. I’m not drunk, my brain rejoiced. I’m not drunk this time. Just a little wine and some brandy, but I’m not doing this because I’m drunk. I’m doing it because I can’t stand the failures any more, the fakes, the frauds. I’m doing it because I don’t want to be another David Heming Stempel, a poor man’s, less-talented David Heming Stempel. I don’t want to wander around on my hands and knees searching every corner for my soul as if it were a lost collar button.
“Hello, hello…There’s no answer?” It was three hours later in New York, which made it two o’clock in the morning there. She had to answer. Where could Beth be at 2 A.M. on a Sunday morning? “All right, then cancel the person-to-person. I’ll talk to anybody at the hotel desk. Hello…Do you have any idea where I could reach Miss Reynolds? She’s away, away for the week-end?…Oh…well, will you take a message? Just tell her that…Oh, never mind, never mind. I’ll call again some time.”
All the excitement was left behind me in the phone booth. There was a dull, twisting pain in my stomach. I never realized before that jealousy was something you could actually feel in your belly like a green and indigestible apple. Beth was my girl, and now that I wanted and needed her I couldn’t even get her on the phone.
I wandered into the cocktail lounge. The Muzak was playing Guy Lombardo. A couple of drunk out-of-town business men who thought they had to be comic as well as spendthrift were pawing a couple of ladies who received their attention with bored, business-like acceptance. A woman in her thirties was sitting alone at a little table, drinking beer. She looked over in unenthusiastic flirtation as I stood at the entrance. Just another bar, another night, another meaningless woman. I turned and went upstairs.
There were empty whisky and soda bottles on the table in the sitting room, and a stale, sour smell in the air. I looked into the bedroom. All the windows were shut, and the shades drawn, and it was hot and close in there. Vince’s clothes were scattered around the room, his shirt on the bathroom door-knob, his shorts on the floor, while piled rather neatly on one chair were the clothes of a woman. Her silk stockings were folded carefully over the foot of the bed.
Their inconsequential lust had spent itself and they were asleep now, with their heads close together on the pillow. How peaceful they looked together! In the morning they would rise as strangers, with not even a kiss or perhaps a kind word, but tonight they were enfolded together in serene sleep. What misfortune or perversity led this woman to wander so casually into the bed of Vince Vanneman? Vince groaned and rolled over, pulling most of the bedclothes with him. The woman, momentarily uncovered, moved toward him in her sleep, fitting herself against his fat back and rump. It was an instinctive, primeval action, the female seeking warmth and protection from the male, and there was something about its performance in this room under these conditions that bore me down into a bottomless depression.
I couldn’t face the morning with this abandoned couple. So I phoned an all-night car-for-hire and drove out of the silent city into the dark, rolling countryside. I drove into Ojai just as dawn was filtering into the valley. Crickets were chirping and the birds were awakening. I tiptoed into the cottage and the room I shared with Doc. Doc was sleeping on his stomach, snoring rhythmically, the covers outlining his deformity. As I slipped into my bed wearily, I remembered it was a good thing I had come out here because I had some photographers due in the morning to cover Toro’s training routine. As I sank into sleep, I was thinking of gags and catchy poses I could use for the lay-out. Just before I went off completely, I remembered somewhere earlier in the evening having told myself I was through with this racket. But it hadn’t even entered my mind again as I drove up. Like a well-trained homing pigeon, I had headed straight for my Giant of the Andes. Well, I had made my bed, I guess, and here I was, lying in it.