Pat Hobby Does his Bit, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

In order to borrow money gracefully one must choose the time and place. It is a difficult business, for example, when the borrower is cockeyed, or has measles, or a conspicuous shiner. One could continue indefinitely but the inauspicious occasions can be catalogued as one—it is exceedingly difficult to borrow money when one needs it.

Pat Hobby found it difficult in the case of an actor on a set during the shooting of a moving picture. It was about the stiffest chore he had ever undertaken but he was doing it to save his car. To a sordidly commercial glance the jalopy would not have seemed worth saving but, because of Hollywood’s great distances, it was an indispensable tool of the writer’s trade.

“The finance company—” explained Pat, but Gyp McCarthy interrupted.

“I got some business in this next take. You want me to blow up on it?”

“I only need twenty,” persisted Pat. “I can’t get jobs if I have to hang around my bedroom.”

“You’d save money that way—you don’t get jobs anymore.”

This was cruelly correct. But working or not Pat liked to pass his days in or near a studio. He had reached a dolorous and precarious forty-nine with nothing else to do.

“I got a rewrite job promised for next week,” he lied.

“Oh, nuts to you,” said Gyp. “You better get off the set before Hilliard sees you.”

Pat glanced nervously toward the group by the camera—then he played his trump card.

“Once—” he said,“—once I paid for you to have a baby.”

“Sure you did!” said Gyp wrathfully. “That was sixteen years ago. And where is it now—it’s in jail for running over an old lady without a licence.”

“Well I paid for it,” said Pat. “Two hundred smackers.”

“That’s nothing to what it cost me. Would I be stunting at my age if I had dough to lend? Would I be working at all?”

From somewhere in the darkness an assistant director issued an order:

“Ready to go!”

Pat spoke quickly.

“All right,” he said. “Five bucks.”

“No.”

“All right then,” Pat’s red-rimmed eyes tightened. “I’m going to stand over there and put the hex on you while you say your line.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Gyp uneasily. “Listen, I’ll give you five. It’s in my coat over there. Here, I’ll get it.”

He dashed from the set and Pat heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe Louie, the studio bookie, would let him have ten more.

Again the assistant director’s voice:

“Quiet!… We’ll take it now!… Lights!”

The glare stabbed into Pat’s eyes, blinding him. He took a step the wrong way—then back. Six other people were in the take—a gangster’s hide-out—and it seemed that each was in his way.

“All right… Roll ’em… We’re turning!”

In his panic Pat had stepped behind a flat which would effectually conceal him. While the actors played their scene he stood there trembling a little, his back hunched—quite unaware that it was a “trolley shot”, that the camera, moving forward on its track, was almost upon him.

“You by the window—hey you, GYP! hands up.”

Like a man in a dream Pat raised his hands—only then did he realize that he was looking directly into a great black lens—in an instant it also included the English leading woman, who ran past him and jumped out the window. After an interminable second Pat heard the order “Cut.”

Then he rushed blindly through a property door, around a corner, tripping over a cable, recovering himself and tearing for the entrance. He heard footsteps running behind him and increased his gait, but in the doorway itself he was overtaken and turned defensively.

It was the English actress.

“Hurry up!” she cried. “That finishes my work. I’m flying home to England.”

As she scrambled into her waiting limousine she threw back a last irrelevant remark. “I’m catching a New York plane in an hour.”

Who cares! Pat thought bitterly, as he scurried away.

He was unaware that her repatriation was to change the course of his life.

II

And he did not have the five—he feared that this particular five was forever out of range. Other means must be found to keep the wolf from the two doors of his coupe. Pat left the lot with despair in his heart, stopping only momentarily to get gas for the car and gin for himself, possibly the last of many drinks they had had together.

Next morning he awoke with an aggravated problem. For once he did not want to go to the studio. It was not merely Gyp McCarthy he feared—it was the whole corporate might of a moving picture company, nay of an industry. Actually to have interfered with the shooting of a movie was somehow a major delinquency, compared to which expensive fumblings on the part of producers or writers went comparatively unpunished.

On the other hand zero hour for the car was the day after tomorrow and Louie, the studio bookie, seemed positively the last resource and a poor one at that.

Nerving himself with an unpalatable snack from the bottom of the bottle, he went to the studio at ten with his coat collar turned up and his hat pulled low over his ears. He knew a sort of underground railway through the make-up department and the commissary kitchen which might get him to Louie’s suite unobserved.

Two studio policemen seized him as he rounded the corner by the barber shop.

“Hey, I got a pass!” he protested, “Good for a week—signed by Jack Berners.”

“Mr Berners specially wants to see you.”

Here it was then—he would be barred from the lot.

“We could sue you!” cried Jack Berners. “But we couldn’t recover.”

“What’s one take?” demanded Pat. “You can use another.”

“No we can’t—the camera jammed. And this morning Lily Keatts took a plane to England. She thought she was through.”

“Cut the scene,” suggested Pat—and then on inspiration, “I bet I could fix it for you.”

“You fixed it, all right!” Berners assured him. “If there was any way to fix it back I wouldn’t have sent for you.”

He paused, looked speculatively at Pat. His buzzer sounded and a secretary’s voice said “Mr Hilliard”.

“Send him in.”

George Hilliard was a huge man and the glance he bent upon Pat was not kindly. But there was some other element besides anger in it and Pat squirmed doubtfully as the two men regarded him with almost impersonal curiosity—as if he were a candidate for a cannibal’s frying pan.

“Well, goodbye,” he suggested uneasily.

“What do you think, George?” demanded Berners.

“Well—” said Hilliard, hesitantly, “we could black out a couple of teeth.”

Pat rose hurriedly and took a step toward the door, but Hilliard seized him and faced him around.

“Let’s hear you talk,” he said.

“You can’t beat me up,” Pat clamoured. “You knock my teeth out and I’ll sue you.”

There was a pause.

“What do you think?” demanded Berners.

“He can’t talk,” said Hilliard.

“You damn right I can talk!” said Pat.

“We can dub three or four lines,” continued Hilliard, “and nobody’ll know the difference. Half the guys you get to play rats can’t talk. The point is this one’s got the physique and the camera will pull it out of his face too.”

Berners nodded.

“All right, Pat—you’re an actor. You’ve got to play the part this McCarthy had. Only a couple of scenes but they’re important. You’ll have papers to sign with the Guild and Central Casting and you can report for work this afternoon.”

“What is this!” Pat demanded. “I’m no ham—” Remembering that Hilliard had once been a leading man he recoiled from this attitude: “I’m a writer.”

“The character you play is called ‘The Rat“,” continued Berners. He explained why it was necessary for Pat to continue his impromptu appearance of yesterday. The scenes which included Miss Keatts had been shot first, so that she could fulfil an English engagement. But in the filling out of the skeleton it was necessary to show how the gangsters reached their hide-out, and what they did after Miss Keatts dove from the window. Having irrevocably appeared in the shot with Miss Keatts, Pat must appear in half a dozen other shots, to be taken in the next few days.

“What kind of jack is it?” Pat inquired.

“We were paying McCarthy fifty a day—wait a minute Pat—but I thought I’d pay you your last writing price, two-fifty for the week.”

“How about my reputation?” objected Pat.

“I won’t answer that one,” said Berners. “But if Benchley can act and Don Stewart and Lewis and Wilder and Woollcott, I guess it won’t ruin you.”

Pat drew a long breath.

“Can you let me have fifty on account,” he asked, “because really I earned that yester—”

“If you got what you earned yesterday you’d be in a hospital. And you’re not going on any bat. Here’s ten dollars and that’s all you see for a week.”

“How about my car—”

“To hell with your car.”

III

“The Rat” was the die-hard of the gang who were engaged in sabotage for an unidentified government of N-zis. His speeches were simplicity itself—Pat had written their like many times. “Don’t finish him till the Brain comes”; “Let’s get out of here”; “Fella, you’re going out feet first.” Pat found it pleasant—mostly waiting around as in all picture work—and he hoped it might lead to other openings in this line. He was sorry that the job was so short.

His last scene was on location. He knew “The Rat” was to touch off an explosion in which he himself was killed but Pat had watched such scenes and was certain he would be in no slightest danger. Out on the back lot he was mildly curious when they measured him around the waist and chest.

“Making a dummy?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” the prop man said. “This thing is all made but it was for Gyp