We came out for the opening of High Noon at Grauman’s. Mona Moray – she played Lenore – let us use that fantastic castle of hers in Beverly Hills. We thought it was going to be awful and that we’d only stay a week, but scads of New York friends had come out and we found a lot of the Hollywood people were fun, in a mad way, like Mickey Neilan and Pringie, Aileen Pringle.

We never thought we’d stay so long. We were really on our way to Hawaii – some friends of ours who had a wonderful house there were expecting us. It was a time when everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. ‘I have a perfectly marvellous house for you to write in,’ they’d say. Of course no one needs marvellous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.

Everybody was waiting for my next book then. My publishers had announced it two years before, when High Noon was still selling. And each time we settled somewhere I found a new excuse for not writing it. A good excuse. There were too many people around. And I wanted to go back and take another look at America, at the Kansas City I was trying to write about (it was one of those books I never finished). And there were magazine stories to write – it was such an easy way to make twenty-five hundred dollars – and we were always short. The year I made sixty thousand, I had to borrow from my publisher. One time when we were very broke and wanted to charter a yacht to cruise the islands of the Mediterranean I locked myself in for a week and wrote four short stories and got ten thousand dollars. They were good stories too. I couldn’t do anything badly then. It took me years to reach the point where I could do things badly.

There were other reasons, of course. There is never a simple reason for not writing a book or not writing your best. It’s fear, it’s greed, it’s sloth – I suppose I suffered from all of these. It was Jere, too. Oh, we were in love, if the word had any shred of meaning left in 1927. In her lean, sharp-boned, restless way she was still more exciting for me than all the Billie Doves, Mary Astors, Corinne Griffiths, and they were lovely women. It wasn’t beauty with Jere, though she had some of that. She had a way of saying things, of wearing clothes, of doing things, aquaplaning, gambling, talking French or Spanish or Italian without an accent; she was a marvellous mimic – once she had done Helen Morgan we could never take Helen seriously again; she could walk on her hands, she could fly a plane, until I made her quit, thinking a high-strung girl like her didn’t belong in the air; she might have made a first-rate Symbolist poet if she had had any discipline or any confidence. It was strange that a girl as handsome as Jere, who could do so many things, should have such a confidence deficiency.

She could do things and she was fine to look at and I loved her and we had too much money and needed more, and all the time, she was a failure and – though it would have seemed preposterous to me then – I was failing too.

I never knew exactly when Jere began to fail. At first I was afraid it was some flaw in me, but I learnt it was earlier and earlier, something to do with motherlessness and paternal neglect.

It was all moonlight and champagne at first, like being on a long date, or like those slick stories of gay crossings and Riviera nights. I wrote some of them myself, God help me. When we were good we were very very peaches-and-creamy head-in-the-clouds castle-in-the-sky good the way our public believed us and wanted us to be. And when we were bad we were horrid to each other, though that was our secret for a long time. Whenever we were out we were those amusing Hallidays; they’re so charming, so witty, so perfect together, and they adore each other like a couple of kids, and after all their Success – we must ask them for dinner, for the weekend, for the winter. Here we go ’round the prickly pear, the prickly pear, the prickly pear, here we go ’round the prickly pear at five o’clock in the morning …

He remembered the afternoon they went to a Dadaist performance, where Tristan Tzara read aloud from a newspaper while an electric bell sounded so clangorously he could not be heard. That same afternoon Picabia had drawn a picture on a blackboard and then, two hours later, erased it, to demonstrate the creative process negated and defied. Manley, who wrote grammatically, with precise syntax and with periods and even semicolons and whose influences were largely Edith Wharton and Henry James, had been appalled at what he called ‘artistic hooliganism’.

Jere had not agreed with all of it – ‘a good Dadaist shouldn’t agree with anything,’ she had explained. But she did believe in the seriousness of Tzara’s motives and in the possibility that they were groping toward a legitimate art form.

Manley had become quite violent about it. Literature was communication. The masters dealt with character and ideas, not with an exhibitionistic play on words.

‘But this century is a turmoil,’ Jere had tried to explain. ‘It needs a new form to express itself. Maybe bells and reading aloud, maybe something no one has thought of yet.’ She was quite sure Rimbaud would have been a Dadaist. ‘He was trying to tear everything down – only he didn’t go as far.’

‘Oh, I’m sick of Rimbaud! Do we have to live with Rimbaud?’

In the dark he heard Jere crying.

‘Jere. Jere darling. Please.’

No answer. The silence was a warm pillow blotting up mysterious tears.

At three-forty-five in the morning, by the luminous clock, he heard her moving near him.

‘Jere?’

‘Yes, pet.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘This.’

‘Ah … ah …’

A long time passed too quickly.

… In nineteen-twenty.

He remembered the long white yacht cradling in the moonlight on Alcudia Bay. The sky was paling. Sunrise would be soon. It was that delicate moment just before. It had been a good evening, with champagne and native Majorcan musicians who had rowed out from the island. Their hosts, Freddie and Gilly Patterson, very rich and rather nice, had finally given in to sleep. So had Cholly Prince, the popular composer, and Bootsie, the strange English girl, who had confessed that she was in love with both of them, and had meant it in a way that had frightened them. Sleep had caught up with the Whitings, who were such good sports, and with the rest of the motley, amiable crowd. The Pattersons could have been more select, but they liked people with a little added seasoning, writers, theatrical folk, almost any celebrities as long as they were ‘regular’, which, to the Pattersons, meant being just a bit irregular. Anyway, they were all sleeping now. At last the ship lay silent. From her bunk Jere whispered, ‘Mannie, are you awake?’

‘Diane, obey me.’

It was their new game, ever since they read, on shipboard, that serious farce The Sheik.

‘Take your compelling stare away from my bosom heaving under this soft silk,’ she answered.

‘I know. I’m a brute and a beast and a devil.’

He slipped out of bed. She was wearing the nightgown with the black lace top that always pleased him. ‘How much longer are you going to fight? Would it not be wiser after what you have seen today to recognise that I am master?’

‘Are all Arabs hard like you? Has love never made you merciful?’

‘Shall I make you love me? I can make women love me when I choose.’

Laughing together, and warning each other to hush like prep-school room-mates, they tiptoed up on deck. The Mediterranean had not yet turned the colour for which it was famous; the oncoming sun had filled it with rose-water. Small dark clouds lay curled up asleep on the horizon – ‘like little cats,’ Jere had whispered.

‘I love you,’ Manley said, as close to her as he could be. ‘If you weren’t my wife, I’d ask you to marry me.’

‘Shhh, don’t move for a moment,’ she had whispered. ‘I want to hear the water.’

The ripplets murmured against the hull. Here the world began and here it ended, begins and ends, begins …

Later they dove from the bow into the clear water of the harbour. Manley watched as she poised on the edge, enjoying the clean lines of her nudity. The dive was perfect; she swam away from the boat with a strong stroke. He kept up with her for a while, with a sense of exhilaration at their being in the sea alone together at daybreak, feeling deeply involved with love and water, primary forces. But after fifty yards he began to tire. ‘How about turning back?’ She shook her head, humourlessly, he thought, and kept on. A little farther out: ‘Jere, we better turn back.’

‘You go if you want to,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see how far I can go.’

‘She’s so damned extreme about everything,’ he thought as he slowly paddled his way back to the boat. In his towel robe, he watched the small dark spot moving out toward the open sea. When she was almost out of sight, a sense of panic set in. She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t – would she? A minute later he realised the dark spot was growing larger. Thank goodness she was on her way in. He held the white towel robe for her as she climbed aboard.

‘I thought you were on your way back to Monaco.’

‘When I get started like that I feel like swimming on and on and never coming back.’

‘But, Jere, you were so happy a little while ago.’

‘Oh, Mannie, I was – satiated. That’s the way I’d like to go.’

‘You’re a crazy minx.’

‘Look at that fat sun. I’m glad I came back. It’s going to be a beautiful day.’

They sat on deck together until the sun was up, so happy with each other that they felt sorry for the people who could not be there, could not be them.

The midday heat had sent them down to their cabin for a lazy nap. Dressing for lunch and feeling logy, much worse than on no sleep at all, Manley said, ‘Darling, I meant to remind you, I’m afraid I wasn’t careful this morning.’ And she said nervously, ‘Manley, it’s a fine time to tell me – I was a little woozy from all the champagne – I didn’t even bother to …’

‘Is it too late for you to – do something?’

‘Yes, damn it. Manley, that’s lousy of you. You know how afraid I am of being …’

‘Jere, let’s not worry yet. It’ll probably turn out all right. Why spoil the trip?’

‘But I don’t want a baby. I’m too young. I’m not ready. We’ve been so free, so lucky. A baby would make us so horribly settled. Mannie, honestly, I’d rather die than get too big in front and heavy in the rear and sit in some park knitting and gabbing to other mothers about toilet-training.’

‘You make it sound like an inferno.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t want me that way either. Oh, damn it, being a woman is a bore sometimes.’

When she had found herself a day overdue she had gone to bed and wept. It seemed like such a dirty trick for nature to sneak up on them that morning at the very moment when they had been indulging themselves in the most delicious, romantic fling of irresponsibility.

Two months before ‘her time’ (why were all the terms connected with childbirth so repulsive? Jere complained), they had embarked for America (Jere discovering a patriotic devotion to the obstetrics of Manhattan). But the child had been delivered by a French ship’s doctor three days out of New York. If it had been a girl, Manley had joked, they would have called it Oceana. Jere was grateful for one thing: the most ungainly period of her pregnancy had been avoided. After a while she even began to love Douglas, but she never quite forgave him, or Manley either, for pressing on her the dowdy crown of motherhood.

All the Halliday friends and followers felt the same way. The Hallidays weren’t ordinary people who bothered about formulas and two-a.m. feedings and jollying infants back to sleep.

Except in rare periods of economy, when Douglas was deposited with Grandma and Grandpa in Kansas City, Douglas was entrusted to a series of French governesses who took elaborate, bilingual care of him, pampering him and practising the delicate art of platonic seduction that lonely women of middle age know so well how to impose on bewildered and lonely little boys. To her delight Jere found that, quite the opposite from her worst narcissist fears, the existence of Douglas contributed to her perpetuity of youth. ‘Darling, you aren’t the mother of a (3, 4, 5, 6) year-old boy! No, I refuse to believe it! With that waist – why it’s positively indecent!’ This sort of thing always, and Jere’s eyes growing bright with triumph as she said her little joke like a child unaware of its precociousness. ‘Oh, up in them Kaintucky Hills we’re courtin’ at seven, lovin’ at eight n’ nursin’ at nine.’

But under the half-developed breast under the tight crepe-de-chine there seeped from the half-developed heart a tiny maternal leak. When they had decided to leave the child in Paris while they went to North Africa (Jere’s brilliant idea to make a sentimental search for Rimbaud’s trading post at Harar) she had asked Douglas if he minded their leaving him for a month or so. ‘Will Mademoiselle be here, Mommy?’ ‘Yes, Duggy.’ ‘Then I don’t care how long you stay.’

To her surprise, she had cried all the rest of the morning. Manley hadn’t taken it very seriously, even when, several times that day, she thought she had changed her mind about going. He knew her tears and her laughter, her conscience and her whims were just a little closer together than most people’s. An hour out of Paris, over a second bottle of St Julien in the dining car, they were hilariously amused by a crotchety old gentleman and his ‘niece’ across the aisle. They improvised indelicate details of the incongruous couple’s relationship in a free adaptation of Petronius Arbiter.

One afternoon in 1928 they woke up in Mona Moray’s Hollywood-Spanish castle of stucco. Jere (whose sleep had been interrupted by a particularly painful dream: she had seen her mother, clearly, holding her in her arms and when she, the baby, had put her mouth down to nurse, the breasts had been hard and flat like a man’s and she had awakened with fitful sobs) came over and sat on the edge of Manley’s bed (still looking seventeen in his pyjamas). ‘I have a wonderful idea for a party.’

Manley had been lying in bed half awake, vaguely worrying about his novel. Started two years ago, put aside for short stories, started again, put aside for travel, then started a third time, he was no longer sure if it was the book he should be doing, the right follow-up for High Noon. Hell, he had never had that trouble in the beginning. Friends and Foes, The Light Fantastic and the early stories and High Noon had to be written. What happens, what happens? he was wondering. But almost at the same time he was computing how much money he’d have to make in the next six months to stay ahead of the game. At twenty-five hundred a story, one a month would do it, with back royalties and extras coming in – maybe a little help from the Market. His Wall Street classmates were saying Radio might go to 400. With ten grand he might make himself forty. Then a whole year off to write his book. No more of this playing around. There were so many things he wanted to try in writing, so many things he hadn’t accomplished. At twenty-nine he was a contemporary success; one critic had called him a ‘Titan’. But it hadn’t really turned his head. At least not when he was in bed with himself, half asleep, half thinking, half knowing where he was and what he had to do.

Manley sat up and flipped out of his mood and into hers. ‘How about an Elinor Glyn party? Everyone has to come in a red fright wig and bring an original novel entitled This Passion Called Love.’

‘No, Mannie, listen – and then tell me you aren’t proud you married me. Let’s give a party in honour of Rin Tin Tin’s stand-in.’

Neither of them felt well enough for breakfast, so they got Naga, the Japanese houseboy they had inherited with the place, to bring up a batch of Martinis. Then they sat down together on the bed and planned the party in detail. They both had a way of being completely serious about frivolous things.

‘We must ask Tom Mix, he’s a dog’s best friend,’ Jere said.

‘Do you think we have to ask Rin Tin Tin? He’ll be hurt if he isn’t invited but he never has anything to say.’

‘He’s a smart dog though. I’ll bet he’s got the first dollar he’s ever made.’

‘A canny canine.’

Jere made a face. ‘Please, Mannie, be serious. Let’s see, we’ll need at least one genius; I suppose two is always safer in case one of them turns out to be somebody’s kid nephew from Hungary, three producers, five directors, three Germans, maybe a Swede and one American for local colour, ten assorted male and female stars, all flavours, a dozen Wampas stars, including one virgin for laughs, three or four screenwriters, young and bitter …’

Jere’s laughter tinkled like the ice in the shaker she stirred. With quick dance movements she hurried to the desk, found pencil and paper and started making out the list: ‘Now for the odds and ends: one assistant director who thinks he’s at another party, a smattering of girls who came from Council Bluffs to break into the movies, one two-thousand-a-week ex-playwright who stands around denouncing Hollywood all night and then goes off with one of the Wampas stars, and, oh yes, two fairies, no three is always more fun, and a call girl who’s been given the wrong address and whom we all mistake for the countess who never shows up. Now, anyone else?’

‘Don’t forget the Capone trigger-man from Chicago – we need at least one underworld celebrity. And a Grand Duke and a Prince or two. We c’n probably get enough real ones but if worse comes to worst we c’n always call in a couple of extras.’

‘Is the Queen of Rumania in town? She’s a good kid.’

‘That reminds me, should we get a date for the dog-of-honour?’

‘Don’t worry, they’ll be plenty of bitches at the party, Man.’

‘We should send out some sort of announcement. We’re giving a little party for Rin Tin Tin’s stand-in – let’s see, what’ll we call him?’

The best Manley could think of was Sin Gin Fin.

‘No, it should be a name with character, with canine it,’ Jere insisted. ‘Like Strongpaws.’

‘Wonderful! A little surprise party for Strongpaws, a fine artist who’s made good in Hollywood and still has his four feet on the ground. Formal dress. Bring your wife or any other dog you know.’

Planning a party for three hundred people is like planning a modest-sized socialised state to exist for a single evening. There is the question of supply, in this case Branstatter’s to cater, and Rudy, the MGM bootlegger, to provide the principal entertainment. Bartenders must be hired, and musicians, butlers, maids. There had to be two attendants to park the cars of those who came without chauffeurs, and a private detective to see that precious jewels were not removed, or precious skins molested. The days of preparation rushed by in a joyous blur.

The terraced gardens were a wonderland of Japanese lanterns, peopled by a super race of which all the women were unbelievably lovely and all the men, except for the genius, the producers and a director or two, were tall, handsome and marvellously joined with their tuxedos. Manley was proud to see that even surrounded by ladies known for their beauty, Jere held her own. Standing near a bush of flaming hibiscus, the green sequins of her gown flickering in the lantern light, the fascinating planes of her face reflecting the soft glow, looking up wittily (she could, he thought) into the collar-ad perfection of Wister La Salle’s face (what do girls see in him? He isn’t handsome; he’s pretty), Jere appeared to Manley as a green goddess. There were girls here with the most beautiful faces in America but not even Bebe Daniels had the vitality, or was it vivacity, no, that wasn’t exactly what he meant either, the inner spirit, the range from Rimbaud to McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He looked at her now as he had stood looking at her the night he had found her, falling in love again. (Damn those songs, always taking words out of lovers’ mouths.) She would always be his necessity.

Everyone was laughing at their sign on a small palm tree in the Garden: ‘First tree in Hollywood honoured by the attention of Strongpaws.’ And everyone applauded as the guest of the evening made an entrance on two feet. Like his master at his side, he was in evening clothes. Jere hurried forward, curtsied prettily and took his paw. ‘Strongpaws, I can’t tell you how delighted I am to see you. I thought you were wonderful in Each Night I Bark. You stole the picture!’

Everyone crowded around, cocktail in hand, playing the game so well that the panting canine might have been John Gilbert or Don Alvarado.

‘Is it true that you’re going to sing in your next picture?’ a young writer asked.

‘I love you when you smile,’ said either Clara Bow or one of a dozen young hopefuls made up to look like her. ‘You have such beautiful teeth.’

‘What’s this people are saying about your going to marry that platinum blonde?’ Manley asked.

There was a laughing crowd around the outdoor bar. ‘I’ve never had so much fun in my life,’ announced a sixteen-year-old Wampas star in the shortest dress of all, lifting her little glass to her exquisite little mouth. ‘How did they ever think of anything so cute?’

‘This is tame,’ said her escort, a director who had been around. ‘You should have seen the one they threw at Deauville last winter.’

He whispered some of it.

‘Oh!’ the child exclaimed. ‘Why, they’re really terrible!’

‘Enfants terribles,’ said the director.

‘You said it!’

Mona Moray, the star of High Noon, described in the fan mags as the ‘Sophisticated Lady of the Silver Screen’, too exotic to be real in gold lamé, was talking to the husband she was divorcing.

‘No, darling, not half the house. The house has always been in my name, darling.’ She smiled up at him exactly as she had when the cameras had flashed for their celebrated rites the year before, and moved off toward the circle favouring Strongpaws.

‘Darling,’ she cried, throwing her golden arms around the creature’s neck in a convincing burlesque of a Hollywood greeting, ‘I think you’re the most virile-looking thing in Hollywood. All that hair on your chest.’

‘Mona should know,’ at least half a dozen cats whispered to their partners.

Naga had decked out the buffet with true oriental attention to detail. A Hawaiian orchestra moaned softly in the background. Three hundred and fifty guests (for the party was so large that one could crash merely by arriving and going to the bar) clustered around the little rented bridge tables. Manley sat at a table with Mona, Strongpaws and his master. At the next table were Jere, Wister La Salle, Mickey Neilan and Sally O’Neill. Jere was laughing at something Wister had just said. Manley knew that sound, not her own laugh but the one she used in flirtation because she thought it was more musical. All the time he was talking to Mona he seemed to be able to see Jere without ever looking at her. To admit he was jealous was a hangover of provincialism; it disturbed him. But lately, she had been worrying him a little: her absurd notion that people only paid attention to her because she was Mrs Manley Halliday. Increasingly, she had imagined that people were snubbing her and she was sure, from the way women smiled when they saw him approach, that he was having all kinds of mad affairs.

While Manley chuckled at something Mona was saying to Strongpaws and at the way Strongpaws (the best-behaved guest at the party) turned his head and seemed to listen, he glanced at Jere. She was raising her lovely head and emptying her wine glass. He frowned. She never used to drink champagne like this, not sipping or tasting. Especially in this last year there had been a new urgency in her drinking. He caught her eye – a furtive warning. She smiled at him, challengingly.

The dinner was climaxed with ice cream sculptured to the heroic form of Strongpaws himself, enclosed in a circle of black cherries in wine. There were calls of speech, speech for Strongpaws and he obliged, rising with his forefeet on the table to deliver a series of well-modulated barks.

‘What’s Al Jolson got that he hasn’t got,’ Jere was saying at her table, ‘except knees?’

‘He’s got better manners than my husband,’ Mona said.

Everyone was getting drunk. Accents slipped off. Men’s hands moved with practised stealth under gowns hospitably knee-length. Words bumped into each other and coupled like little boxcars. Mild attractions suddenly flamed to irresistible passions; minor irritations flamed to violent hatreds. Couples slipped off into dark corners of the garden. A wife said to her actor-husband ‘If you talk to that slut once more I’ll leave you’ and he took the challenge and she kept her word.

This is what Jere and Manley loved about parties; they were a quickening of life’s normal pulse; they made dull people bearable and bright people brighter; they put people in a dice cage and shook them up to see what new combinations would appear. A look, a word, a right or wrong move, after the third drink, could make a friend, a career, a lover, an enemy. The sum of a party was so much more than the mere addition of all its parts. The Hallidays loved the sense of mystery, of teasing the fates and tempting the furies, of what’s-going-to-happen-tonight.

This party was in its ascendancy. It needed only the slightest turn of the swizzle stick to start it bubbling up. The white orchestra (that alternated with the black jazz band) was all soft strings and muted saxophones. There was a spatter of applause and Manley saw that Wister La Salle was on the bandstand. His sweet, almost feminine tenor fluttered gently over the garden. ‘Two by two, they go marching through – the Sweethearts on parade …’

—‘Look, baby, isn’t that Fay Lamphere over there?’

—‘Shhhh.’

The simple-sweet lyric and the simple-sweet voice crooned on.

—‘He’s a terrific bet for talkies.’

—‘I hear he’s as queer as a square grape.’

—‘You should be that queer, honey.’

Manley did not miss the way La Salle, turning his head prettily, sang directly to Jere. And he did not miss the way her eyes laughed yes! Damn them, he could hear it.

—‘Listen, chump, Grange never saw the day he could play with Wilson. He just had a better publicity man.’

—‘Lou, you missed a fight in a million Friday night.’

—‘Don’t worry, honey, one more won’t hurt you. It’ll make you feel better.’

‘… Sweethearts on parade.’ The frail, simpering voice trailed off and Wister La Salle blew kisses to his audience in exchange for their applause.

The band medleyed into ‘Jeannine’ and someone said isn’t that Blanche Mehaffey over there and somebody said don’t you think Dolores Del Rio is the most beautiful woman in Hollywood and someone said no, Dolores Costello and somebody said the trumpet player is cute and somebody said you and trumpet players and somebody said I heard a cute one in the commissary the other day and somebody said I had a cute one in my dressing room the other day and somebody said for the fifth time that evening Won’t it be great when we have Smith for President so we can get liquor back and somebody said I wish they’d play ‘Sweethearts on Parade’ and somebody said where were you, dopey, they just did and somebody said I love champagne but it doesn’t love me and somebody said look at her talking babytalk why you know what we call her on the lot the human pincushion and somebody said she hasn’t got any morals I mean she doesn’t even try to hide what she does and somebody said Great Just the Greatest Thing Since the Ten Commandments and somebody said which ones God’s or DeMille’s and of course somebody said you better not let C.B. hear you giving him second billing and somebody said for the sixth time that evening Pardon me while I go into my strange innertube and somebody said for the sixteenth time These are Coolidge stockings They do not choose to run and somebody said how about it and somebody said we’ll see and somebody said so I says look Irving and somebody said I think the old songs four or five years ago were a lot better than the ones we have now and somebody said so I speak right up I says lissen Mr Van Berghoff maybe I’m only a lousy five-dollar-a-day extra but I and somebody said honestly I don’t hate her I’m sorry for her and somebody said O Christ every time she has three drinks she has to get up and sing I Faw Down an’ Go Boom and somebody said I wish she’d just Faw Down an’ Go Boom without singing about it and somebody said take my word for it that stock won’t stop till it reaches and somebody said I think Manley Halliday is cuter looking than the Prince of Wales and somebody said haven’t had so much fun since Marion’s masquerade party and somebody said hey kids don’t miss this – Jere’s doing an imitation of Pavlova doing an imitation of Gilda Grey doing the shimmy on the buffet table.

Mona came up with a drink for Manley while he was watching and kissed him playfully. ‘What’s this scandalous talk I hear about your being faithful to Jere?’

‘Know what I am? Inverted Vic-torian, tha’s what I am.’

Mona’s personality, in the artificial twilight of the coloured lanterns, flashed like radium. She was not so much a woman of infinite charm, Manley was thinking, as a brilliant imitation of a woman of infinite charm.

‘I wish I had more chance to talk to you. I love intelligent men. I’m so fed up with these Hollywood males – all shop talk and passes.’

‘Mona, been thinking about you. You’re complex. You’re an awful little egotist ’n at the same time you’re still scared, still searching – in here you know’ – the thought was receding from him like the backwash of a wave and he was running down the strand to catch up with it – ‘you know – you haven’t fulfilled yourself.’

‘Darling,’ Mona cried in triumph, throwing out her arms as she had learnt to do, ‘you know me! You know me!’

Jere and Wister La Salle were doing a burlesque adagio.

‘Your wife oughta be in pictures,’ Sam Loeb, a veteran producer, was telling Manley. ‘She’s a natural little comedienne.’

‘Sir,’ Manley said, ‘I’ll have you know you are speaking of the woman I love.’

The dancers had drifted to the side of the pool illuminated with underwater lights of red and blue and green. A trim little Wampas star from Hollywood High School with marmalade hair who was always taking her clothes off did so again. She posed on the edge of the diving board and for a tantalising moment Manley enjoyed the unreal sense of beauty of the scene – the fine young body offered so freely to the night, so fearlessly. The sight of her clothed only in moonlight aroused no other emotion in him than a strange pride. When she was old, forty or fifty, she would remember that she had been alive and that her youth had lit up a pool more brightly than all the coloured lights.

The child with the marmalade hair, now that everyone had seen her, made her dive – up, up, with mermaid grace, ah now – too bad, a belly flop. He was angry with her, the anticlimax lending a sudden vulgarity to the performance, the mood of fantasy interrupted by the slap of bare breast and belly against the water. Jere would never have spoilt it that way. He had seen Jere diving nude from the bow of a yacht, splendidly silhouetted against the floodlight arching down and knifing through the surface so perfectly that she had seemed not at all a naked woman but some nymph of the sea returning home to the green depths.

Wonder where Jere is. Time he and Jere had a dance together. Time he and Jere …

‘Watch this, kid, it’s gonna be rich.’ A dapper Middle-Westerner, who passed on the screen for a European sharper, flashed his toothy trademark grin in Manley’s face. Manley turned to see a stubby little man impeccably dressed with a red ribbon of honour slashed across his chest approaching the producer J.C. Coles, who had come from Eastern Europe as Jakob Kolinsky a fast twenty-five years before. Coles was fifty, bald, vain, with a hard mind in a soft body, a terror to his employees but clearly inadequate and insecure at parties that were not his own. He would never have come to such a wingding as this if his wife of five months, the young star Mary Gay, hadn’t insisted. It was a Hollywood joke that Coles adored his little Mary Gay to the point of insanity. He phoned her from the studio every hour of the day and night. He had studio detectives follow her. He adored her.

‘Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Count Pierre de Corday de la Corbierre.’

‘I am delighted to have the honour,’ Coles announced with a slight accent and a sense of European deference.

The Count whipped out a jewelled cigarette case with his crest on it. He identified himself, modestly, as a cousin of the French Consul-General. Coles, preparing a French Foreign Legion story that required French Government cooperation, became even more attentive.

‘Permit me to compliment you,’ the Count said, ‘on the extraordinary beauty of your wife.’

Coles, tugged one way by pride and another by jealousy, muttered politely.

‘Such complexion,’ the Count went on. ‘Such elegance. Such hair. Eyes that would turn the meekest of men into Casanovas …’

‘Yes, yes, thank you,’ Coles tried to interrupt.

But the Count, apparently swept on by his own romantic momentum, could not be put off. ‘—with the figure of Diana, Salomé, shoulders as pink and full as …’

‘Count, excuse me, but I must ask you to …’

‘And breasts, ah, like white peonies, with their …’

Red-faced, dry-throated, Coles began to choke his protest.

‘Mr Coles, I am something of a sculptor,’ the Count persisted. ‘Perhaps you know my work. I have done some of the most famous beauties of England and France, in the nude, lovely creatures all—’ he kissed his fingers appreciatively ‘—but none to compare with the charming Mrs Coles. If I could have the honour of using her for a model – if you would allow her to come to my studio in Carmel for, say, just a few weeks …’

Coles let out a terrible sound, between a cry of pain and a warrior’s shout, and grabbed the Count by the neck and began to shake him hysterically, while the Count screamed Help! Help! and the crowd around them laughed and laughed.

Manley, watching the scene in a kind of fascinated horror, broke through the circle and tried to separate them like a referee, somewhat sobered by the unhappy sound of struggle. ‘I don’t know who you are but I’ll have to ask you to …’

The Count snickered and suddenly switched from his accent to plain American. ‘F’ Chris’sake, Mr Halliday, I’m Gus Jones.’

‘Who?’

‘Gus Jones.’

Something about the bluntness of the name hammered home. Gus Jones. The professional ribber who hired out to parties to needle the guests. He and Jere had talked about him, but he didn’t remember engaging him. Maybe Jere had. Anyway it was a joke, just a little gag he was explaining to J.C. Coles and Gus Jones’ impromptu audience lifted their voices in laughter as if on cue.

‘I see, yes, of course, a joke,’ Coles repeated, but the blood-pressure complexion, so suddenly risen, had not yet begun to subside.

‘Manley, you’re a card, you really made it look real,’ somebody he didn’t know chuckled in his face. Manley drifted toward the bar. ‘Wha’luhave, kiddo?’ The bartender grinned. Everybody was drunk. The pool was full of bathers now. Manley noticed that a swimmer who hadn’t bothered to remove his tux looked rather indecent. Manley was conscious only of the background babble of water splashing, laughter splashing, music splashing (the coloured band ‘In a Mist’) pierced by the occasional shrieks of frolicking young ladies to whom playful things were being done.

‘In a Mist’ – he and Jere were crazy about the Beiderbecke record, he was telling Colleen Moore or somebody who looked an awful lot like her. The girl who except for the cut of her hair didn’t look anything like Colleen Moore melted away.

Jere’s face floated up big-eyed and expectant.

‘Jere, been lookin’ all over for you …’

‘Looking for you too. Didn’t think it would be nice if I left without telling you.’

Her face seemed to bob back and forth like a balloon in a breeze. He could see that her eyes were unusually large the way they always were when she was excited by anger or happiness. ‘Hear what they’re playin’? They mean well but they aren’t Bix or Tram …’

‘Mannie, I’m leaving with Wister.’

A hurried kiss touched his cheek. The sounds of festivity swirled around him. Somebody fell, glass splattered, band tore up ‘12th Street Rag’, marmalade girl costumed in towels now did a hula on the diving board. There was a terrible cry from somewhere in the garden, Wha’happened? Wassa matter? Manley managed to reach the circle of curious guests jostling for a better view of the little blonde who had been playing the drums. ‘Sonofabitch bit me,’ she said, pointing to the dog several men were holding. The owner moved excitedly. ‘He never bites – he’s a good dog – she was teasing him.’ The victim’s escort came nobly to her defence by swatting Strongpaw’s owner on the nose. The dog barked hysterically. The little blonde sobbed. It was all over in a moment. Manley, surprised to find he still had a hundred dollars in his pocket, told the owner to take the beast home. ‘Go on, shake hands with the man and say thank you,’ the owner insisted. Strongpaws and Manley complied reluctantly. Christ, now he’d probably have to pay for the little blonde’s dress, maybe doctor bills. Whose idea was that Strongpaws gag anyway? Jere’s. Say, where the hell was Jere?

‘G’night, ’night, wunnerful time—’ The party was thinning out. The hopefuls and the die-hards were still going strong. And the white band was tapping out an old favourite, ‘Why Do I Love You?’

Look for Jere. No Jere anywhere. No Jere and no Wister. Jere really leave? A word, a kiss, goodbye. Did she say she was going? Was the whole thing in his mind? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was he couldn’t find her. Fine thing for the hostess. Should always wait ’n say ’night to all your guests before running off with another man.

‘’Night, ’night, glad ya did, see ya soon, lost your what in the pool? Oh y’r anklet, look f’r it in the morning, ’T’s morning now, ha ha ha all right some other morning …’

Seeing Mona to the gate (‘This hour of the morning always frightens me, Manley. Never know what I’ll do.’ ‘Be a good girl now, Mona. Le’s Montmartre later this week’) his eyes were distracted to the parking space. Wister’s Daimler must be along there some place. They wouldn’t just go, wouldn’t just—‘Manley, I’d adore it if you’d come down to the beach for tea one afternoon.’ Her lips were cool and tasted more of promise than of passion.

‘Love to, Mona, any time.’ He waved vaguely. No Daimler. No Daimler and no Jere. God damn her. So this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a Daimler.

The last melodic phrase had drifted out over the garden. The last drunk had been subdued. The last promise was made for lunch or cocktails this week. The last pair of high heels climbed wearily into the last limousine. The last of the bartenders made off with the last of the booze. ‘Don’t bother,’ Manley heard himself mutter to Naga. ‘Le’s clean it up t’morra.’ He reached in his pocket to give Naga an extra tip but his pockets were empty now. Must’ve given it to someone else.

He walked slowly back into the big house, barred the heavy medieval door and stood in the vast stone hallway. It was so quiet he could hear his own heavy breathing. Only in the days of feudal lords or now in Hollywood would anyone think of inhabiting such a house. It was five times too big for two people, a hundred times too large for one. He walked slowly through the cold, formal spaciousness of the living room. Living room! Who had ever lived here? This heartless, phony barn of a house. There was only one room fit to live in and that was the little barroom panelled in pine and decorated with Toulouse-Lautrec posters. You could live in the bar. He peered into the icebox under the bar and found a split of champagne. He lifted the glass to himself in the mirror. My God, was that he? He looked forty. St Bernard eyes. He brought his face closer to the mirror, staring at himself as if the image were a stranger.

When the champagne was gone and he could find no more he settled for half a pint of Golden Wedding. Always Golden Wedding, the bootleggers’ favourite label. After champagne the whisky tasted awful. To get it down he had to drink it fast. When the bottle was empty, for hell or for spite, he threw it as hard as he could through the archway into the living room. It fell without breaking and slid harmlessly along the carpet. Couldn’t do that again, he thought. But then, what can you do again?

He opened the closest bottle on the shelf. It was peach brandy but he didn’t care. Jere was gone, out somewhere in the languid Californian dawn with a languid hero whose personality was as synthetic as his name. Where were they now, making for Palm Springs, to some improvised love-nest along the road, or settling down to first-time intimacies in the elegant bachelor bedroom of some luxurious hideaway? And did she have that look in her eyes that no other man was supposed to see? And was she making her own little loving sounds, her monosyllabic incantations that had only the most accidental connection with vulgarity?

He poured out the remnants of the peach brandy into a highball glass – the cuckold’s cocktail, he thought darkly, new recipe for Harry McElhone, and flung the empty bottle without aiming. It crashed against the far wall and the crash of glass splattering sounded good and violent.

He staggered out from behind the bar, heavy-legged, heavy-brained, up the long winding wrought-iron staircase (overwrought, he and Jere had joked about it) to the bedroom that wasn’t cosy wasn’t theirs because they had no home. He stared into the empty room and noticed the lipsticked tips of half a dozen crushed cigarette butts (‘Jere, three packs a day, you’ve got to cut down’) crumpled on the floor near the chair, the beige suit she had taken off to dress for the party (never in all their living together had he ever seen her hang anything up), near her bed the murder mysteries she bought and left behind in hotel rooms by the dozen. He picked one up – The Club of Masks – wish she wouldn’t waste her good mind on this trash – out of the pages dropped a leaf of stationery from the Hotel del Coronado where they had spent the weekend before last. Manley made out the few scratchy pencil lines of an abortive poem:

A STUDY FOR THE LEFT HAND NOT KNOWING

WHAT THE RIGHT HAND IS DOING

We are me and me are I

loosened goosened lorelei

if she hollers let her gonium

eeney miney pandemonium

I am what I never could

being what I never should

if she dies before she tries

who’ll put pennies on her eyes

She is I and I am wh

Another one of those things she was never finishing. The discarded clothes, the cigarette butts (some crushed out after only two or three drags), the books on the floor, the unfinished poem made him feel as if he were some sort of tourist of the emotions visiting the sentimental monuments erected to the memory of Jere Halliday. Maybe those songs aren’t so far off after all, he thought. There’s nothing left to me of things that used to be, I live in memory among my souvenirs, even if they are cigarette butts, crumpled slips and bras, broken lines of impulsive verse and other symbols of feminine disorder. Even so, he was moved now in a sentimental way. Salt drops burned in his eyes and he wanted to bawl. He groped to the sleeping porch where he and Jere had lain together a dozen hours before. He looked more closely and found a tiny gold heart – one of her earrings had come off. She had a hole punctured in only one ear because she had started to faint and had been afraid to let the jeweller go on. Strange, she was a daredevil swimmer, diver, flyer, hunter, but the thought of anything sharp drawing blood from her always brought on vertigo. The memory of her one pierced ear, for some reason, was more than he could stand. Flopping down on the daybed he cried hysterically into his hands.

Some time later (an hour, a day, an eon) he must have gotten up, must have gone down to the living room and turned on the radio, for he heard things: Jack Smith whispering ‘Cecilia’ and I’m in heah-vun when I see you smile, smile for me, my Diane … comes to you from the famous Cocoanut Grove, playground of the stars … he’s in with a short jab to the mouth, another jab, and then Young Nationalista … Chicago, Presidential Candidate Herbert Hoover said today I foresee the day and that not far off when every working man in America will not only own his own … and minutes, was it hours, was it days later, he was crashing another empty bottle against the stucco walls interrupting the simpering Texas-Guinan-in-Christ voice of Aimee Semple MacPherson crying out her spiritual wares like a Panama City crib-girl. Oughta write a novel about Aimee. He thought he was having an inspiration: female Elmer Gantry with Hollywood trimmings. ‘And so I say to all you good people tonight don’t just get out and get under the moon, get out and get under God!’ The bottle in his hand wasn’t empty, but he sent it hurtling against the face of the radio shut up SHUT UP, too stupefied to remember he could turn it off, too stupefied to tell day from night, gin from brandy, love from hate.

Beyond drunkenness he lay on the floor and felt himself sliding down as it swung around to serve as wall, ceiling, floor, wall again. Chri’sakes, wh’sa’matter wi’ me? Must’ve gotten sick. Couldn’t be drunk because just a minute ago I was thinking clear as a bell. ‘Jere … Jere …’ His voice came to him as from another room and an unfamiliar throat. ‘Jere …’ Too many people ’round her ’n me, too many people, gets t’ be a habit, bad habit. Only good habit’s writing your best. Making money’s a bad habit, needing money’s a bad habit, success is a bad habit, America’s fulla bad habits an’ you Manley Halliday you’re as American as baked beans and more easily spoilt. Cigarette’s gone out. Hadda match in my hand. Where’s ’at match go? Thought I lit it. Can’t find it. Where’s ’at match? He ’n Jere … the match?

It was warm, not believing, warmer crying over spilt champagne and wasted energy hot crying Jere Jere, there was fire raging inside him. Damn bootlegger stuff damn trash damn need for a thousand-a-week, damn Jere damn fire’s a word in a song rhymes with desire, pyre. ’F I burnt would I be a big talent turning on the spit of success over fagots of cheap fame and cheap stories (at twenty-five hundred berries might as well do one more) (look Honey if I lock myself in for two weeks and knock out four we’ll have ten thousand bucks and can go to …) big empty house wasn’t cold any more red arms of flame reached through a window and gesticulated crazily as if beckoning for help help Jere my talent’s on fire it’s padded with dollar bills that burn like money help Jere help let the damn barn burn and my fat and my flesh tainted with success but for Chris’sakes Jere anybody don’t let the talent burn away to cinder …

The house that had always been so cold roared with the heat of a blast furnace. Upstairs in the study with the red leather furniture one hundred and three pages of the novel that Dorset House had expected to publish the year after The Night’s High Noon was curling to a soft grey ash. At the same time Manley was remembering O Jesus Burt Seixas had always begged me to make him a carbon. Forcing himself up out of the crackling stupor, he managed to reach the bottom of the stairway, but as he decided to go up, the stairs were deciding to come down.

—‘Mannie darling, it’s me! Can you see me? Mannie …’

He had seen nothing but whiteness but now a fuzzed impression of dark red hair came down to him. He concentrated on seeing. He was in love with that face. Never knew why. It just pleased him. It had always pleased him. The twinge of a smile moved his lips slightly under the bandage.

‘Darling, can you hear me? When I heard what you had done I – I almost died too …’

It took him a little time to realise what she meant. Oh, she would love him now. It was one thing to say I can’t live without you. It was another to, to actually try to take your own – well, had he? The last thing he remembered was thinking with a terrible, hypertrophic clarity about his life, his shortcomings and the things he did or didn’t believe. And he remembered calling Jere. And something about fire.

‘Darling, darling, how can I ever make it up to you for being such a – dope? I’m going to buy you a pearl-handled horsewhip.’

‘Accident,’ he started to say under the bandages. But then he thought: is that fair to her when her face is lit up with rededication? No, for loss of my girl I tried to take my life and maybe I did, yes, maybe I did …

‘Mannie, I was a dope,’ she was saying into the bandages, ‘a sixteen-cylinder dope.’

And then she said, beginning to feel back with him again, ‘I am not afraid of anything with your arms around me. Ahmed. Monseigneur.’

Involuntarily, his shoulders began to shake. ‘Please, Mrs Halliday,’ said the stern-faced nurse, ‘you mustn’t make him laugh.’