“You darling! Everybody’s so glad you’re back.”
She gave them background; for their own dignity they wanted her in pictures again. There was scarcely any other actress of whom that could have been said.
“Now, I’ve got to give a party,” she told George.
“But you have. Your being anywhere makes it a party.”
George was growing up—entering Yale in a week. But he meant it too.
“Either very small or very large,” she pondered, “—or else I’ll hurt people’s feelings. And this is not the time, at the very start of a career.”
“You ought to worry, with people breaking veins to get you.”
She hesitated—then brought him a two-page list.
“Here are the broken veins,” she said. “Notice that there’s something the matter with every offer—a condition or a catch. Look at this character part; a fascinating older woman—and me not thirty. It’s either money—lots of money tied to a fatal part, or else a nice part with no money. I’ll open up the house.”
With her entourage and some scrubbers, Dolly went out next day and made ready as much of the house as she would need.
“Candles everywhere,” George exclaimed, the afternoon of the event. “A fortune in candles.”
“Aren’t they nice! And once I was ungrateful when people gave them to me.”
“It’s magnificent. I’m going into the garden and rehearse the pool lights—for old times’ sake.”
“They don’t work,” said Dolly cheerfully. “No electricity works—a flood got in the cellar.”
“Get it fixed.”
“Oh, no—I’m dead broke. Oh yes—I am. The banks are positive. And the house is thoroughly mortgaged and I’m trying to sell it.”
He sat in a dusty chair.
“But how?”
“Well—it began when I promised the cast to go on tour, and it turned hot. Then the treasurer ran away to Canada. George, we have guests coming in two hours. Can’t you put candles around the pool?”
“Nobody sent you pool-candlesticks. How about calling in the money you’ve loaned people?”
“What? A little glamor girl like me! Besides, now they’re poorer still, probably. Besides, Hennen kept the accounts except he never put things down. If you look so blue I’ll go over you with this dustcloth. Your tuition is paid for a year—”
“You think I’d go?”
Through the big room a man George had never seen was advancing toward them.
“I didn’t see any lights, Miss Bordon. I didn’t dream you were here, I’m from Ridgeway Real Estate—”
He broke off in profound embarrassment. It was unnecessary to explain that he had brought a client—for the client stood directly behind him.
“Oh,” said Dolly. She looked at Phyllis, smiled—then she sat down on the sofa, laughing. “You’re the client; you want my house, do you?”
“Frankly, I heard you wanted to sell it,” said Phyllis.
Dolly’s answer was muffled in laughter but George thought he heard: “It would save time if I just sent you all my pawn checks.”
“What’s so very funny?” Phyllis inquired.
“Will your—family move in too? Excuse me; that’s not my business.” Dolly turned to Ridgeway Real Estate. “Show the Countess around—here’s a candlestick. The lights are out of commission.”
“I know the house,” said Phyllis. “I only wanted to get a general impression.”
“Everything goes with it,” said Dolly, adding irresistibly, “—as you know. Except George. I want to keep George.”
“I own the mortgage,” said Phyllis absently.
George had an impulse to walk her from the room by the seat of her sea-green slacks.
“Now Phylis!” Dolly reproved her gently. “You know you can’t use that without a riding crop and a black moustache. You have to get a Guild permit. Your proper line is ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’ ”
“Well, I don’t have to listen to this,” said Phyllis.
When she had gone, Dolly said, “They asked me to play heavies.”
“Why, four years ago,” began George, “Phyllis was—”
“Shut up, George. This is Hollywood and you play by the rules. There’ll be people coming here tonight who’ve committed first degree murder.”
When they came, she was her charming self, and she made everyone kind and charming so that George even failed to identify the killers. Only in a washroom did he hear a whisper of conversation that told him all was guessed at about her hard times. The surface, though, was unbroken. Even Hymie Fink roamed around the rooms, the white blink of his camera when he pointed it, or his alternate grin when he passed by, dividing those who were up from those coming down.
He pointed it at Dolly, on the porch. She was an old friend and he took her from all angles. Judging by the man she was sitting beside, it wouldn’t be long now before she was back in the big time.
“Aren’t you going to snap Mr. Jim Jerome?” Dolly asked him. “He’s just back in Hollywood today—from England. He says they’re making better pictures; he’s convinced them not to take out time for tea in the middle of the big emotional scenes.”
George saw them there together and he had a feeling of great relief—that everything was coming out all right. But after the party, when the candles had squatted down into little tallow drips, he detected a look of uncertainty in Dolly’s face—the first he had ever seen there. In the car going back to the hotel bungalow she told him what had happened.
“He wants me to give up pictures and marry him. Oh, he’s set on it. The old business of two careers and so forth. I wonder—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t wonder. He thinks I’m through. That’s part of it.”
“Could you fall in love with him?”
She looked at George—laughed.
“Could I? Let me see—”
“He’s always loved you. He almost told me once.”
“I know. But it would be a strange business; I’d have nothing to do—just like Hennen.”
“Then don’t marry him; wait it out. I’ve thought of a dozen ideas to make money.”
“George, you terrify me,” she said lightly. “Next thing I’ll find racing forms in your pocket, or see you down on Hollywood Boulevard with an oil well angle—and your hat pulled down over your eyes.”
“I mean honest money,” he said defiantly.
“You could go on the stage like Freddie and I’ll be your Aunt Prissy.”
“Well, don’t marry him unless you want to.”
“I wouldn’t mind—if he was just passing through; after all every woman needs a man. But he’s so set about everything. Mrs. James Jerome. No! That isn’t the way I grew to be and you can’t help the way you grow to be, can you? Remind me to wire him tonight—because tomorrow he’s going East to pick up talent for Portrait of a Woman.”
George wrote out and telephoned the wire, and three days later went once more to the big house in the valley to pick up a scattering of personal things that Dolly wanted.
Phyllis was there—the deal for the house was closed, but she made no objections, trying to get him to take more and winning a little of his sympathy again, or at least bringing back his young assurance that there’s good in everyone. They walked in the garden, where already workmen had repaired the cables and were testing the many-colored bulbs around the pool.
“Anything in the house she wants,” Phyllis said. “I’ll never forget that she was my inspiration and ideal, and frankly what’s happened to her might happen to any of us.”
“Not exactly,” objected George. “She has special things happen because she’s a ‘grande cliente.’ ”
“I never knew what that meant,” laughed Phyllis. “But I hope it’s a consolation if she begins brooding.”
“Oh, she’s too busy to brood. She started work on Portrait of a Woman this morning.”
Phyllis stopped in her promenade.
“She did! Why, that was for Katharine Cornell, if they could persuade her! Why, they swore to me—”
“They didn’t try to persuade Cornell or anyone else. Dolly just walked into the test—and I never saw so many people crying in a projection room at once. One guy had to leave the room—and the test was just three minutes long.”
He caught Phyllis’ arm to keep her from tripping over the board into the pool. He changed the subject quickly.
“When are you—when are you two moving in?”
“I don’t know,” said Phyllis. Her voice rose. “I don’t like the place! She can have it all—with my compliments.”
But George knew that Dolly didn’t want it. She was in another street now, opening another big charge account with life. Which is what we all do after a fashion—open an account and then pay.
This story was written in Hollywood in July 1939 and led to Fitzgerald’s break with Harold Ober over the agent’s refusal to resume the policy of making advances against unsold stories. At this time Fitzgerald was hoping to underwrite work on The Last Tycoon by returning to the high-paying magazines. Apart from the Pat Hobby series, he was cautious about writing Hollywood stories because he was saving the best material for his novel. He submitted “Director’s Special,” the first version of this story, to The Saturday Evening Post, which declined it because the ending was not clear. He revised it in August, but the Post declined it again. Fitzgerald admitted to Ober: “It is not quite a top story—and there’s nothing much I can do about it. The reasons are implicit in the structure which wanders a little. … It simply couldn’t stand any cutting whatsoever and one of the reasons for its faults is that I was continually conscious in the first draft of that Collier length and left out all sorts of those sideshows that often turn out to be highspots.”
Hoping to establish a connection with Collier’s in the summer of 1939, Fitzgerald submitted several stories to fiction editor Kenneth Littauer—all of which were declined. With one of these stories
