This was his arrow—but to his vast surprise it glanced off.
“Oh, do you think so?” she cried. “Are you going to give me a chance?”
“Why, certainly.” It was hard to believe that the irony in his voice was missing its mark. “But after tonight there’ll be so much competition that—”
“Oh, I’d rather work for you,” she declared. “I’ll tell Joe Berker—”
“Don’t tell him anything,” he interrupted.
“Oh, I won’t. I’ll do just as you say,” she promised.
Her eyes were wide and expectant. Disturbed, he felt that words were being put in his mouth or slipping from him unintended. That so much innocence and so much predatory toughness could go side by side behind this gentle English voice.
“You’d be wasted in bits,” he began. “The thing is to get a fat part—” He broke off and started again, “You’ve got such a strong personality that—”
“Oh, don’t!” He saw tears blinking in the comers of her eyes. “Let me just keep this to sleep on tonight. You call in the morning—or when you need me.”
The car came to rest at the carpet strip in front of the dance. Seeing Pamela, the crowd bulged forward grotesquely, autograph books at the ready. Failing to recognize her, it sighed back behind the ropes.
In the ballroom he danced her to Becker’s table.
“I won’t say a word,” she answered. From her evening case she took a card with the name of her hotel penciled on it. “If any other offers come I’ll refuse them.”
“Oh, no,” he said quickly.
“Oh, yes.” She smiled brightly at him and for an instant the feeling Jim had had on seeing her came back. It was an impression of a rich warm sympathy, of youth and suffering side by side. He braced himself for a final quick slash to burst the scarcely created bubble.
“After a year or so—” he began. But the music and her voice overrode him.
“I’ll wait for you to call. You’re the—you’re the most civilized American I’ve ever met.”
She turned her back as if embarrassed by the magnificence of her compliment. Jim started back to his table—then seeing Elsie Donohue talking to a woman across his empty chair, he turned obliquely away. The room, the evening had gone raucous—the blend of music and voices seemed inharmonious and accidental and his eyes covering the room saw only jealousies and hatreds—egos tapping like drumbeats up to a fanfare. He was not above the battle as he had thought.
He started for the coatroom thinking of the note he would dispatch by waiter to his hostess: “You were dancing.” Then he found himself almost upon Pamela Knighton’s table, and turning again he took another route toward the door.
III
A picture executive can do without intelligence but he cannot do without tact. Tact now absorbed Jim Leonard to the exclusion of everything else. Power should have pushed diplomacy into the background, leaving him free, but instead it intensified all his human relations—with the executives, with the directors, writers, actors and technical men assigned to his unit, with department heads, censors and “men from the East” besides. So the stalling off of one lone English girl, with no weapon except the telephone and a little note that reached him from the entrance desk, should have been no problem at all.
Just passing by the studio and thought of you and of our ride. There have been some offers but I keep stalling Joe Becker. If I move I will let you know.
A city full of youth and hope spoke in it—in its two transparent lies, the brave falsity of its tone. It didn’t matter to her—all the money and glory beyond the impregnable walls. She had just been passing by—just passing by.
That was after two weeks. In another week Joe Becker dropped in to see him. “About that little English girl, Pamela Knighton—remember? How’d she strike you?”
“Very nice.”
“For some reason she didn’t want me to talk to you.” Joe looked out the window. “So I suppose you didn’t get along so well that night.”
“Sure we did.”
“The girl’s engaged, you see, to some guy in England.”
“She told me that,” said Jim, annoyed. “I didn’t make any passes at her if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Don’t worry—I understand those things. I just wanted to tell you something about her.”
“Nobody else interested?”
“She’s only been here a month. Everybody’s got to start. I just want to tell you that when she came into “21” that day the barflies dropped like—like flies. Let me tell you—in one minute she was the talk of cafe society.”
“It must have been great,” Jim said dryly.
“It was. And Lamarr was there that day too. Listen—Pam was all alone, and she had on English Clothes, I guess, nothing you’d look at twice—rabbit fur. But she shone through it like a diamond.”
“Yeah?”
“Strong women,” Joe went on, “wept into their Vichyssoise. Elsa Maxwell—”
“Joe, this is a busy morning.”
“Will you look at her test?”
“Tests are for make-up men,” said Jim, impatiently. “I never believe a good test. And I always suspect a bad one.”
“Got your own ideas, eh?”
“About that,” Jim admitted. “There’ve been a lot of bad guesses in projection rooms.”
“Behind desks, too,” said Joe rising.
IV
A second note came after another week:
When I phoned yesterday one secretary said you were away and one said you were in conference. If this is a run-around tell me. I’m not getting any younger. Twenty-one is staring me in the face—and you must have bumped off all the old men.”
Her face had grown dim now. He remembered the delicate cheeks, the haunted eyes, as from a picture seen a long time ago. It was easy to dictate a letter that told of changed plans, of new casting, of difficulties which made it impossible——
He didn’t feel good about it but at least it was finished business. Having a sandwich in his neighborhood drugstore that night, he looked back at his month’s work as good. He had reeked of tact. His unit functioned smoothly. The shades who controlled his destiny would soon see.
There were only a few people in the drugstore. Pamela Knighton was the girl at the magazine rack. She looked up at him, startled, over a copy of the Illustrated London News.
Knowing of the letter that lay for signature on his desk Jim wished he could pretend not to see her. He turned slightly aside, held his breath, listened. But though she had seen him, nothing happened, and hating his Hollywood cowardice he turned again presently and lifted his hat.
“You’re up late,” he said.
Pamela searched his face momentarily. “I live around the corner,” she said. “I’ve just moved—I wrote you today.”
“I live near here, too.”
She replaced the magazine in the rack. Jim’s tact fled. He felt suddenly old and harassed and asked the wrong question.
“How do things go?” he asked.
“Oh, very well,” she said. “I’m in a play—a real play at the New Faces theater in Pasadena. For the experience.”
“Oh, that’s very wise.”
“We open in two weeks. I was hoping you could come.”
They walked out the door together and stood in the glow of the red neon sign. Across the autumn street newsboys were shouting the result of the night football.
“Which way?” she asked.
The other way from you, he thought, but when she indicated her direction he walked with her. It was months since he had seen Sunset Boulevard, and the mention of Pasadena made him think of when he had first come to California ten years ago, something green and cool.
Pamela stopped before some tiny bungalows around a central court.
“Good night,” she said. “Don’t let it worry you if you can’t help me. Joe has explained how things are, with the war and all. I know you wanted to.”
He nodded solemnly—despising himself.
“Are you married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then kiss me good night.”
As he hesitated she said. “I like to be kissed good night. I sleep better.”
He put his arms around her shyly and bent down to her lips, just touching them—and thinking hard of the letter on his desk which he couldn’t send now—and liking holding her.
“You see it’s nothing,” she said. “Just friendly. Just good night.”
On his way to the corner Jim said aloud, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and kept repeating the sinister prophecy to himself for some time after he was in bed.
V
On the third night of Pamela’s play Jim went to Pasadena and bought a seat in the last row. A likely crowd was jostling into the theater and he felt glad that she would play to a full house, but at the door he found that it was a revival of Room Service—Pamela’s play was in the Experiment Hall up the stairs.
Meekly he climbed to a tiny auditorium and was the first arrival except for fluttering ushers and voices chattering amid the hammers backstage. He considered a discreet retirement but was reassured by the arrival of a group of five, among them Joe Becker’s chief assistant. The lights went out; a gong was beaten; to an audience of six the play began.
It was about some Mexicans who were being deprived of relief. Concepcione (Pamela Knighton) was having a child by an oil magnate. In the old Horatio Alger tradition, Pedro was reading Marx so someday he could be a bureaucrat and have offices at Palm Springs.
Pedro: “We stay here. Better Boss Ford than Renegade Trotsky.”
Concepcione: (Miss Knighton): “But who will live to inherit?”
Pedro: “Perhaps the great-grandchildren, or the grandchildren of the great-grandchildren. Quien
