“Don’t you think I’m smart to go in the morning?” I asked.
“Yeah. To the busiest man in California. He’ll appreciate it. Why didn’t you wake him up at four?”
“That’s just it. At night he’s tired. He’s been looking at people all day and some of them not bad. I come in in the morning and start a tram of thought.”
“I don’t like it. It’s brazen.”
“What have you got to offer? And don’t be rough.”
“I love you,” he said without much conviction. “I love you more than I love your money and that’s plenty. Maybe your father would make me a supervisor.”
“I could marry the last man tapped for Bones this year and live in Southampton.”
I turned the dial and got either “Gone” or “Lost”—there were good songs that year. The music was getting better again. When I was young during the Depression it wasn’t so hot and the best numbers were from the twenties like Benny Goodman playing “Blue Heaven” or Paul Whiteman with “When Day Is Done.” There were only the bands to listen to. But now I liked almost everything except Father singing “Little Girl, You’ve Had a Busy Day” to try to create a sentimental father-and-daughter feeling.
“Lost” and “Gone” were the wrong mood so I turned again and
got “Lovely To Look At” which was my kind of poetry. I looked back as we crossed the crest of the foothills—with the air so clear you could see the leaves on Sunset Mountain two miles away. It’s startling to you sometimes—just air, unobstructed, uncomplicated air.
“Lovely to look at-de-lightful to know-w-w,” I sang.
“Are you going to sing for Stahr?” Wylie said. “If you do, get in a line about my being a good supervisor.”
“Oh, this’ll be only Stahr and me,” I said. “He’s going to look at me and think ’I’ve never really seen her before.’”
“We don’t use that line this year,” he said.
“—Then he’ll say ’Little Celia’ like he did the night of the earthquake. He’ll say he never noticed I have become a woman.”
“You won’t have to do a thing.”
“I’ll stand there and bloom. After he kisses me as you would a child—”
“That’s all in my script,” complained Wylie. “And I’ve got to show it to him tomorrow.”
“—he’ll sit down and put his face in his hands and say he never thought of me like that.”
“You mean you get in a little fast work during the kiss.”
“I bloom, I told you. How often do I have to tell you I bloom.”
“It’s beginning to sound pretty randy to me,” said Wylie. “How about laying off—I’ve got to work this morning.”
“Then he says it seems as if he was always meant to be this way.”
“Right in the industry. Producer’s blood.” He pretended to shiver. “I’d hate to have a transfusion of that.”
“Then he says—”
“I know all his lines,” said Wylie. “What I want to know is what you say.”
“Somebody comes in,” I went on.
“And you jump up quickly off the casting couch smoothing your skirts.”
“Do you want me to walk out and get home?”
We were in Beverly Hills, getting very beautiful now with the tall Hawaiian pines. Hollywood is a perfectly zoned city so you know exactly what kind of people economically live in each section from executives and directors, through technicians in their bungalows right down to extras. This was the executive section and a very fancy lot of pastry. It wasn’t as romantic as the dingiest village of Virginia or New Hampshire but it looked nice this morning.
“They asked me how I knew,” sang the radio, “—my true love was true.”
My heart was fire and smoke was in my eyes and everything but I figured my chance at about fifty-fifty. I would walk right up to him as if I was either going to walk through him or kiss him in the mouth—and stop a bare foot away and say Hello with disarming understatement.
And I did—though of course it wasn’t like I expected. Stahr’s beautiful dark eyes looking back into mine, knowing I am dead sure everything I was thinking—and not a bit embarrassed. I stood there an hour, I think, without moving and all he did was twitch the side of his mouth and put his hands in his pockets.
“Will you go with me to the ball tonight?” I asked.
“What ball?”
“The screen-writers’ ball down at the Ambassador.”
“Oh yes.” He considered. “I can’t go with you. I might just come in late. We’ve got a sneak preview in Glendale.”
How different it all was than what you’ve planned. When he sat down I went over and put my head among his telephones like a sort of desk appendage and looked at him and his dark eyes looked back so kind and nothing. Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing. All I succeeded in putting into his head was:
“Why don’t you get married, Celia?”
Maybe he’d bring up Robby again, try to make a match there.
“What could I do to interest an interesting man?” I asked him.
“Tell him you’re in love with him.”
“Should I chase him?”
“Yes,” he said smiling.
“I don’t know. If it isn’t there it isn’t there.”
“I’d marry you,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m lonesome as hell. But I’m too old and tired to undertake anything.”
I went around the desk and stood beside him.
“Undertake me.”
He looked up in surprise, understanding for the first time that I was in deadly earnest.
“Oh no,” he said. He looked almost miserable for a minute. “Pictures are my girl. I haven’t got much time—” He corrected himself quickly, “I mean any time. It’d be like marrying a doctor.”
“You couldn’t love me.”
“It’s not that,” he said and—right out of my dream but with a difference, “I never thought of you that way, Celia. I’ve known you so long. Somebody told me you were going to marry Wylie White.”
“And you had—no reaction.”
“Yes, I did. I was going to speak to you about it. Wait till he’s been sober for two years.”
“I’m not even considering it, Monroe.”
We were way off the track, and just as in my day-dream somebody came in—only I was quite sure Stahr had pressed a concealed button.
I’ll always think of that moment, when I felt Miss Doolan behind me with her pad, as the end of childhood, the end of the time when you cut out pictures. What I was looking at wasn’t Stahr but a picture of him I cut out over and over: the eyes that flashed a sophisticated understanding at you and then darted up too soon into his wide brow with its ten thousand plots and plans; the face that was ageing from within, so that there were no casual furrows of worry and vexation but a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self—set struggle—or a long illness. It was handsomer to me than all the rosy tan from Coronado to Del Monte. He was my picture, as sure as if he was pasted on the inside of my old locker in school. That’s what I told Wylie White and when a girl tells the man she likes second best about the other one—then she’s in love.
13 (continued)
I noticed the girl long before Stahr arrived at the dance. Not a pretty girl, for there are none of those in Los Angeles—one girl can be pretty but a dozen are only a chorus. Nor yet a professional beauty—they do all the breathing for everyone and finally even the men have to go outside for air. Just a girl, with the skin of one of Raphael’s corner angels and a style that made you look back twice to see if it were something she had on.
I noticed her and forgot her. She was sitting back behind the pillars at a table whose ornament was a faded semi-star who, in hopes of being noticed and getting a bit, rose and danced regularly with some scarecrow males. It reminded me shamefully of my first party where Mother made me dance over and over with the same boy to keep in the spotlight. The semi-star spoke to several people at our table but we were busy being Cafe Society and she got nowhere at all.
From our angle it appeared that they all wanted something.
“You’re expected to fling it around,” said Wylie, “—like in the old days. When they find out you’re hanging on to it they get discouraged. That’s what all this brave gloom is about—the only way to keep their self respect is to be Hemingway characters. But underneath they hate you in a mournful way and you know it.”
He was right—I knew that since 1933 the rich could only be happy alone together.
I saw Stahr come into the half-light at the top of the wide steps and stand there with his hands in his pockets looking around. It was late and the lights seemed to have burned a little lower, though they were the same. The floor show was finished except for a man who still wore a placard which said that at midnight in the Hollywood Bowl Sonja Henie was going to skate on hot soup. You could see the sign as he danced becoming less and less funny on his back. A few years before there would have been drunks around. The faded actress seemed to be looking for them hopefully over her partner’s shoulder. I followed her with my eyes when she went back to her table—
—and there, to my surprise, was Stahr talking to the other girl. They were
