Tout passe.—L’art robuste
Seul a l’eternite.
“And there’s the Prince from Denmark,” said Catherine Doolan. “He’s very handsome.” She was impelled to add pointlessly “—for a tall man.”
“Thanks,” Stahr said. “Thank you, Catherine, I appreciate it that I am now the handsomest small man on the lot. Send the Prince out on the sets and tell him we’ll lunch at one.”
“And Mr. George Boxley—looking very angry in a British way.”
“I’ll see him for ten minutes.”
As she went out he asked:
“Did Robby phone in?”
“No.”
“Call Sound and if he’s been heard from call him and ask him this. Ask him this—did he hear that woman’s name last night. Either of those women. Or anything so they could be traced.”
“Anything else?”
“No, but tell him it’s important while he still remembers. What were they? I mean what kind of people—ask him that too. I mean were they—”
She waited, scratching his words on her pad without looking.
“—oh, were they—questionable? Were they theatrical? Never mind—skip that. Just ask if he knows how they can be traced.”
The policeman, Malone, had known nothing. Two dames and he had hustled ’em you betcha. One of them was sore. Which one? One of them. They had a car, a Chewy, he thought of taking the license. Was it—the good looker who was sore? It was one of them.
Not which one—he had noticed nothing. Even on the lot here Minna was forgotten. In three years. So much for that then.
Episode 8
Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it—finally emerging as what it was, a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired but always there, toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult aggressive and outright.
Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.
Stahr looked at him courteously.
“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”
The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.
“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal but with a faint two—edged deference.
“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say but they spoil it—they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”
“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.
“I have. I sent you some.”
“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”
Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said:
“I don’t think you people read things. The men are dueling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.”
He barked again and subsided.
“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”
“What? Naturally not.”
“You’d consider it too cheap.”
“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley hedging.
“Do you ever go to them?”
“No—almost never.”
“Isn’t it because people are always dueling and falling down wells?”
“Yes—and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.”
“Skip the dialogue for a minute,” said Stahr. “Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write—that’s why we brought you out here. But let’s imagine something that isn’t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?”
“I think it has,” said Boxley stiffly, “—but I never use it.”
“Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting duels or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring—dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her—idly. She doesn’t see you though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table—”
Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.
“She has two dimes and a nickle—and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickle on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window—but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello—listens—and says deliberately into the phone ’I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.’ She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes—”
Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.
“Go on,” said Boxley smiling. “What happens?”
“I don’t know,” said Stahr. “I was just making pictures.”
Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong.
“It’s just melodrama,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” said Stahr. “In any case nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested.”
“What was the nickle for?” asked Boxley evasively.
“I don’t know,” said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed, “Oh yes—the nickle was for the movies.”
The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“What in hell do you pay me for?” he demanded. “I don’t understand the damn stuff.”
“You will,” said Stahr grinning. “Or you wouldn’t have asked about the nickle.”
A dark saucer-eyed man was waiting in the outer office as they came out.
“Mr. Boxley, this is Mr. Mike Van Dyke,” Stahr said. “What is it, Mike?”
“Nothing,” Mike said. “I just came up to see if you were real.”
“Why don’t you go to work?” Stahr said. “I haven’t had a laugh in the rushes for days.”
“I’m afraid of a nervous breakdown.”
“You ought to keep in form,” Stahr said. “Let’s see you peddle your stuff.” He turned to Boxley. “Mike’s a gag man—he was out here when I was in the cradle. Mike, show Mr. Boxley a double wing, clutch, kick and scram.”
“Here?” asked Mike.
“Here.”
“There isn’t much room. I wanted to ask you about—”
“There’s lots of room.”
“Well,” he looked around tentatively. “You shoot the gun.”
Miss Doolan’s assistant, Katie, took a paper bag, blew it open.
“It was a routine,” Mike said to Boxley “—back in the Keystone days.” He turned to Stahr. “Does he know what a routine is?”
“It means an act,” Stahr explained. “Georgie Jessel talks about ’Lincoln’s Gettysburg routine.’”
Katie poised the neck of the blown up bag in her mouth. Mike stood with his back to her.
“Ready?” Katie asked. She brought her hand down on the side. Immediately Mike grabbed his bottom with both hands, jumped in the air, slid his feet out on the floor one after the other, remaining in place and flapping his arms twice like a bird —
“Double wing,” said Stahr.
—And then ran-out the screen door which the office boy held open for him and disappeared past the window of the balcony.
“Mr. Stahr,” said Miss Doolan, “Mr. Hanson is on the phone from New York.”
Ten minutes later he clicked his Dictograph and Miss Doolan came in. There was a male star waiting to see him in the outer office Miss Doolan said.
“Tell him I went out by the balcony,” Stahr advised her.
“All right. He’s been in four times this week. He seems very anxious.”
“Did he give you any hint of what he wanted? Isn’t it something he can see Mr. Brady about?”
“He didn’t say. You have a conference coming up. Miss Meloney and Mr. White are outside. Mr. Broaca is next door in Mr. Rienmund’s office.”
“Send — in,” said Stahr. “Tell him I can see him only for a minute.”
When the handsome actor came in Stahr remained standing.
“What is it that can’t wait?” he asked pleasantly.
The actor waited carefully till Miss Doolan had gone out.
“Monroe, I’m through,” he said. “I had to see you.”
“Through!” said Stahr. “Have you seen ’Variety’? Your picture’s held over at Roxy’s and did thirty-seven thousand in Chicago last week.”
“That’s the worst of it. That’s the tragedy. I get everything I want and now it means nothing.”
“Well, go on explain.”
“There’s nothing between Esther and me anymore. There never can be again.”
“A row.”
“Oh, no—worse—I can’t bear to mention it. My head’s in a daze. I wander
