Mr Mulliner, who had been sipping his hot Scotch and lemon in a rather distrait way, glanced up.
'Did I hear you mention the name Minna Nordstrom?'
'We were arguing about how she became a star. I was saying that she must have had a pull of some kind.'
'In a sense,' said Mr Mulliner, 'you are right. She did have a pull. But it was one due solely to her own initiative and resource. I have relatives and connections in Hollywood, as you know, and I learn much of the inner history of the studio world through these channels. I happen to know that Minna Nordstrom raised herself to her present eminence by sheer enterprise and determination. If Miss Postlethwaite will mix me another hot Scotch and lemon, this time stressing the Scotch a little more vigorously, I shall be delighted to tell you the whole story.'
When people talk with bated breath in Hollywood – and it is a place where there is always a certain amount of breath-bating going on – you will generally find, said Mr Mulliner, that the subject of their conversation is Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer, the popular president of the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Corporation. For few names are more widely revered there than that of this Napoleonic man.
Ask for an instance of his financial acumen, and his admirers will point to the great merger for which he was responsible – that merger by means of which he combined his own company, the Colossal-Exquisite, with those two other vast concerns, the Perfecto-Fishbein and the Zizzbaum-Celluloid. Demand proof of his artistic genius, his flair for recognizing talent in the raw, and it is given immediately. He was the man who discovered Minna Nordstrom.
To-day when interviewers bring up the name of the world-famous star in Mr Schnellenhamer's presence, he smiles quietly.
'I had long had my eye on the little lady,' he says, 'but for one reason and another I did not consider the time ripe for her début.Then I brought about what you are good enough to call the epoch-making merger, and I was enabled to take the decisive step. My colleagues questioned the wisdom of elevating a totally unknown girl to stardom, but I was firm. I saw that it was the only thing to be done.'
'You had vision?'
'I had vision.'
All that Mr Schnellenhamer had, however, on the evening when this story begins was a headache. As he returned from the day's work at the studio and sank wearily into an arm-chair in the sitting-room of his luxurious home in Beverly Hills, he was feeling that the life of the president of a motion-picture corporation was one that he would hesitate to force on any dog of which he was fond.
A morbid meditation, of course, but not wholly unjustified. The great drawback to being the man in control of a large studio is that everybody you meet starts acting at you. Hollywood is entirely populated by those who want to get into the pictures, and they naturally feel that the best way of accomplishing their object is to catch the boss's eye and do their stuff.
Since leaving home that morning Mr Schnellenhamer had been acted at practically incessantly. First, it was the studio watchman who, having opened the gate to admit his car, proceeded to play a little scene designed to show what he could do in a heavy rôle. Then came his secretary, two book agents, the waitress who brought him his lunch, a life insurance man, a representative of a film weekly, and a barber. And, on leaving at the end of the day, he got the watchman again, this time in whimsical comedy.
Little wonder, then, that by the time he reached home the magnate was conscious of a throbbing sensation about the temples and an urgent desire for a restorative.
As a preliminary to obtaining the latter, he rang the bell and Vera Prebble, his parlourmaid, entered. For a moment he was surprised not to see his butler. Then he recalled that he had dismissed him just after breakfast for reciting Gunga Din in a meaning way while bringing the eggs and bacon.
'You rang, sir?'
'I want a drink.'
'Very good, sir.'
The girl withdrew, to return a few moments later with a decanter and siphon. The sight caused Mr Schnellenhamer's gloom to lighten a little. He was justly proud of his cellar, and he knew that the decanter contained liquid balm. In a sudden gush of tenderness he eyed its bearer appreciatively, thinking what a nice girl she looked.
Until now he had never studied Vera Prebble's appearance to any great extent or thought about her much in any way. When she had entered his employment a few days before, he had noticed, of course, that she had a sort of ethereal beauty; but then every girl you see in Hollywood has either ethereal beauty or roguish gaminerie or a dark, slumberous face that hints at hidden passion.
'Put it down there on the small table,' said Mr Schnellenhamer, passing his tongue over his lips.
The girl did so. Then, straightening herself, she suddenly threw her head back and clutched the sides of it in an ecstasy of hopeless anguish.
'Oh! Oh! Oh!' she cried.
'Eh?' said Mr Schnellenhamer.
'Ah! Ah! Ah!'
'I don't get you at all,' said Mr Schnellenhamer.
She gazed at him with wide, despairing eyes.
'If you knew how sick and tired I am of it all! Tired ... Tired ... Tired. The lights ... the glitter ... the gaiety... It is so hollow, so fruitless. I want to get away from it all, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!'
Mr Schnellenhamer retreated behind the Chesterfield. That laugh had had an unbalanced ring. He had not liked it. He was about to continue his backward progress in the direction of the door, when the girl, who had closed her eyes and was rocking to and fro as if suffering from some internal pain, became calmer.
'Just a little thing I knocked together with a view to showing myself in a dramatic role,' she said.
'Watch! I'm going to register.'
She smiled.
'Joy.'
She closed her mouth.
'Grief
She wiggled her ears.
'Horror.'
She raised her eyebrows.
'Hate.'
Then, taking a parcel from the tray:
'Here,' she said, 'if you would care to glance at them, are a few stills of myself. This shows my face in repose. I call it "Reverie". This is me in a bathing suit ... riding ... walking ... happy among my books ... being kind to the dog. Here is one of which my friends have been good enough to speak in terms of praise – as Cleopatra, the warrior-queen of Egypt, at the Pasadena Gas-Fitters' Ball. It brings out what is generally considered my most effective feature – the nose, seen sideways.'
During the course of these remarks Mr Schnellenhamer had been standing breathing heavily. For a while the discovery that this parlourmaid, of whom he had just been thinking so benevolently, was simply another snake in the grass had rendered him incapable of speech. Now his aphasia left him.
'Get out!' he said.
'Pardon?' said the girl.
'Get out this minute. You're fired.'
There was a silence. Vera Prebble closed her mouth, wiggled her ears, and raised her eyebrows. It was plain that she was grieved, horror-stricken, and in the grip of a growing hate.
'What,' she demanded passionately at length, 'is the matter with all you movie magnates? Have you no hearts? Have you no compassion? No sympathy? No understanding? Do the ambitions of the struggling mean nothing to you?'
'No,' replied Mr Schnellenhamer in answer to all five questions.
Vera Prebble laughed bitterly.
'No is right!' she said. 'For months I besieged the doors of the casting directors. They refused to cast me. Then I thought that if I could find a way into your homes I might succeed where I had failed before. I secured the post of parlourmaid to Mr Fishbein of the Perfecto-Fishbein. Half-way through Rudyard Kipling's "Boots" he brutally bade me begone. I obtained a similar position with Mr Zizzbaum of the Zizzbaum-Celluloid. The opening lines of "The Wreck of the Hesperus" had hardly passed my lips when he was upstairs helping me pack my trunk. And now you crush my hopes. It is cruel ... cruel ... Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!'
She rocked to and fro in an agony of grief. Then an idea seemed to strike her.
'I wonder if you would care
to see me in light comedy? ... No? ... Oh, very well.'
With a quick droop of the eyelids and a twitch of the muscles of the cheeks she registered resignation.
'Just as you please,' she said. Then her nostrils quivered and she bared the left canine tooth to indicate Menace. 'But one last word. Wait!'
'How do you mean, wait?'
'Just wait. That's all.'
For an instant Mr Schnellenhamer was conscious of a twinge of uneasiness. Like all motion-picture magnates, he had about forty-seven guilty secrets, many of them recorded on paper. Was it possible that ...
Then he breathed again. All his private documents were secure in a safe-deposit box. It was absurd to imagine that this girl could have anything on him.
Relieved, he lay down on the Chesterfield and gave himself up to day-dreams. And soon, as he remembered that that morning he had put through a deal which would enable him to trim the stuffing out of two hundred and seventy-three exhibitors, his lips curved in a contented smile and Vera Prebble was forgotten.
One of the advantages of life in Hollywood is that the Servant Problem is not a difficult one. Supply more than equals demand. Ten minutes after you have thrown a butler out of the back door his successor is bowling up in his sports-model car. And the same applies to parlourmaids. By the following afternoon all was well once more with the Schnellenhamer domestic machine. A new butler was cleaning the silver: a new parlourmaid was doing whatever parlourmaids do, which is very little. Peace reigned in the home.
But on the second evening, as Mr Schnellenhamer, the day's tasks over, entered his sitting-room with nothing in his mind but bright thoughts of dinner, he was met by what had all the appearance of a human whirlwind. This was Mrs Schnellenhamer. A graduate of the silent films, Mrs Schnellenhamer had been known in her day as the Queen of Stormy Emotion, and she occasionally saw to it that her husband was reminded of this.
'Now see what!' cried Mrs Schnellenhamer.
Mr Schnellenhamer was perturbed.
'Is something wrong?' he asked nervously.
'Why did you fire that girl, Vera Prebble?'
'She went ha-ha-ha-ha-ha at me.'
'Well, do you know what she has done? She has laid information with the police that we are harbouring alcoholic liquor on our premises, contrary to law, and this afternoon they came in a truck and took it all away.'
Mr Schnellenhamer reeled. The shock was severe. The good man loves his cellar.
'Not all?' he cried, almost pleadingly.
'All.'
'The Scotch?'
'Every bottle.'
'The gin?'
'Every drop.'
Mr Schnellenhamer supported himself against the Chesterfield.
'Not the champagne?' he whispered.
'Every case. And here we are, with a hundred and fifty people coming to-night, including the Duke.'
Her allusion was to the Duke of Wigan, who, as so many British dukes do, was at this time passing slowly through Hollywood.
'And you know how touchy dukes are,' proceeded Mrs Schnellenhamer. 'I'm told that the Lulubelle Mahaffys invited the Duke of Kircudbrightshire for the week-end last year, and after he had been there two months he suddenly left in a huff because there was no brown sherry.'
A motion-picture magnate has to be a quick thinker. Where a lesser man would have wasted time referring to the recent Miss Prebble as a serpent whom he had to all intents and purposes nurtured in his bosom, Mr Schnellenhamer directed the whole force of his great brain on the vital problem of how to undo the evil she had wrought.
'Listen,' he said. 'It's all right. I'll get the bootlegger on the 'phone, and he'll have us stocked up again in no time.'
But he had overlooked the something in the air of Hollywood which urges its every inhabitant irresistibly into the pictures. When he got his bootlegger's number, it was only to discover that that life-saving tradesman was away from home. They were shooting a scene in 'Sundered Hearts' on the Outstanding Screen-Favourites lot, and the bootlegger was hard at work there, playing the role of an Anglican bishop. His secretary said he could not be disturbed, as it got him all upset to be interrupted when he was working.
Mr Schnellenhamer tried another bootlegger, then another. They were out on location.
And it was just as he had begun to despair that he bethought him of his old friend, Isadore Fishbein; and into his darkness there shot a gleam of hope. By the greatest good fortune it so happened that he and the president of the Perfecto-Fishbein were at the moment on excellent terms, neither having slipped anything over on the other for several weeks. Mr Fishbein, moreover, possessed as well-stocked a cellar as any man in California. It would be a simple matter to go round and borrow from him all he needed.
Patting Mrs Schnellenhamer's hand and telling her that there were still blue-birds singing in the sunshine, he ran to his car and leaped into it.
The residence of Isadore Fishbein was only a few hundred yards away, and Mr Schnellenhamer was soon whizzing in through the door. He found his friend beating his head against the wall of the sitting-room and moaning to himself in a quiet undertone.
'Is something the matter?' he asked, surprised.
'There is,' said Mr Fishbein, selecting a fresh spot on the tapestried wall and starting to beat his head against that. 'The police came round this afternoon and took away everything I had.'
'Everything?'
'Well, not Mrs Fishbein,' said the other, with a touch of regret in his voice. 'She's up in the bedroom with eight cubes of ice on her forehead in a linen bag. But they took every drop of everything else. A serpent, that's what she is.'
'Mrs Fishbein?'
'Not Mrs Fishbein. That parlourmaid. That Vera Prebble. Just because I stopped her when she got to "boots, boots, boots, boots, marching over Africa" she ups and informs the police on me. And Mrs Fishbein with a hundred and eighty people coming to-night, including the ex-King of Ruritania!'
And, crossing the room, the speaker began to bang his head against a statue of Genius Inspiring the Motion-Picture Industry.
A good man is always appalled when he is forced to contemplate the depths to which human nature can sink, and Mr Schnellenhamer's initial reaction on hearing of this fresh outrage on the part of his late parlourmaid was a sort of sick horror. Then the brain which had built up the Colossal-Exquisite began to work once more.
'Well, the only thing for us to do,' he said, 'is to go round to Ben Zizzbaum and borrow some of his stock. How do you stand with Ben?'
'I stand fine with Ben,' said Mr Fishbein, cheering up. 'I heard something about him last week which I'll bet he wouldn't care to have known.'
'Where does he live?'
'Camden Drive.'
'Then tally-ho!' said Mr Schnellenhamer, who had once produced a drama in eight reels of two strong men battling for a woman's love in the English hunting district.
They were soon at Mr Zizzbaum's address. Entering the sitting-room, they were shocked to observe a form rolling in circles round the floor with its head between its hands. It was travelling quickly, but not so quickly that they were unable to recognize it as that of the chief executive of the Zizzbaum-Celluloid Corporation. Stopped as he was completing his eleventh lap and pressed for an explanation, Mr Zizzbaum revealed that a recent parlourmaid of his, Vera Prebble by name, piqued at having been dismissed for deliberate and calculated reciting of the works of Mrs Hemans, had informed the police of his stock of wines and spirits and that the latter had gone off with the whole collection not half an hour since.
'And don't speak so loud,' added the stricken man, 'or you'll wake Mrs Zizzbaum. She's in bed with ice on her head.'
'How many cubes?' asked Mr Fishbein.
'Six.'
'Mrs Fishbein needed eight,' said that lady's husband a little proudly.
The situation was one that might well have unmanned the stoutest motion-picture executive, and there were few motion-picture executives stouter than Jacob Schnellenhamer. But it was characteristic
of this man that the tightest corner was always the one to bring out the full force of his intellect. He thought of Mrs Schnellenhamer waiting for him at home, and it was as if an electric shock of high voltage had passed through him.
'I've got it,' he said. 'We must go to Glutz of the Medulla-Oblongata. He's never been a real friend of mine, but if you loan him Stella Svelte and I loan him Orlando Byng and Fishbein loans him Oscar the Wonder-Poodle on his own terms, I think he'll consent to give us enough to see us through to-night. I'll get him on the 'phone.'
It was some moments before Mr Schnellenhamer returned from the telephone booth. When he did so, his associates were surprised to observe in his eyes a happy gleam.
'Boys,' he said, 'Glutz is away with his family over the weekend. The butler and the rest of the help are out joy-riding. There's only a parlourmaid in the house. I've been talking to her. So there won't be any need for us to give him those stars, after all. We'll just run across in the car with a few axes and help ourselves. It won't cost us above a hundred dollars to square this girl. She can tell him she was upstairs when the burglars broke in and didn't hear anything. And there we'll be, with all the stuff we need and not a cent to pay outside of overhead connected with maid.'
There was an awed silence.
'Mrs Fishbein will be pleased.'
'Mrs Zizzbaum will be pleased.'
'And Mrs Schnellenhamer will be pleased,' said the leader of the expedition. 'Where do you keep your axes, Zizzbaum?'
'In the cellar.'
'Fetch 'em!' said Mr Schnellenhamer in the voice a Crusader might have used in giving the signal to start against the Paynim.
In the ornate residence of Sigismund Glutz, meanwhile, Vera Prebble, who had entered the service of the head of the Medulla-Oblongata that morning and was already under sentence of dismissal for having informed him with appropriate gestures that a bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malemute saloon, was engaged in writing on a sheet of paper a short list of names, one of which she proposed as a nom de théâtre as soon as her screen career should begin.
For this girl was essentially an optimist, and not even all the rebuffs which she had suffered had been sufficient to quench the fire of ambition in her.