She said: “I’m just wondering why you haven’t already started.”
“Started what?”
“The medical thing, if it’s what you want.”
“Carey, you’re rather wonderful. I have started. I’ve written to Columbia asking about entrance requirements.”
She saw and heard the bridge game ending across the room and the sudden burst of talk as the score was added up. She had time to say: “I’m glad, Norris, I’m very glad,” and then to add quietly: “I think your father’s won —he looks so pleased with himself.”
Austen came towards them smiling. “Eleven dollars and thirty cents,” he remarked, with a satisfaction which, from him, could only be considered charming.
* * * * *
That night, because again she found sleep difficult, she began Paul’s manuscript. She had had it in her possession for over a week, during which there had been several chances for private reading, but she had felt no urgency; Paul’s life story was like Paul himself in her life—close or distant beyond computation in miles or days. But she had promised to give her opinion, and, once she began, it was certainly no effort to form one.
The opening chapters were interesting, without a doubt. She could also (though she was no real judge of this) imagine that some publisher might take a chance on the whole book, if only for its general liveliness and gossip value. But what struck her, amusingly at first, and then appallingly as she went on, was the picture it presented of Paul himself—an absurd picture on the surface, yet beneath the absurdity so ruefully revealing. For he was his own complete hero from the first sentence. Nothing had ever happened but added a mosaic to the finished pattern of the man who was always right (and whose enemies and friends alike were always wrong), a man infinitely wise and desperately victimized, a man who had never done a foolish or a selfish or an unjustifiable thing, but whom the world had treated with constant unawareness of the paragon living in its midst. The picture was flawless (Carey realized) because it was constructed with the awful sincerity of self-hypnosis. Errors, even of simple fact, were numerous and monumental. Poor old Foy, for instance, appeared as a philistine who had cut short the run of Othello when it was still making money but not enough to satisfy his avarice, and various other theatrical figures whom Paul had quarrelled with in London and New York were hardly recognizable in their completely satanic guise. For the passage of the years was to Paul no softener into greys, but rather a lens through which the blacks were blacker, and his own white whiter than snow. It was demonology, not autobiography. And all this in depicting the comparatively minor rancours of those early years. (There was, of course, no reference at all to that obliterated year in Hollywood.) What would happen, Carey wondered, when he came to his film-making experiences in Germany (the Everyman affair), and the war-time ordeal of the internment camp?
She read with greater misgivings as she proceeded, and with the greatest of all when she turned back to re-read passages here and there. She was sure, by then, that for Paul to publish it (even supposing it were free from technical libel) would be disastrous. Not that it was badly written (it had some of the glibness that had made him, in his youth, a promising journalist of sorts), but there was no quality in it to offset its own angle of distortion, and its sole perfection was for this reason non-literary, clinical, and ludicrous. If he had wished to give the world the documented confession of an egomaniac, this was it, and of value, doubtless, in a psychiatrist’s library; but among the informed public those who did not sue would probably laugh their heads off. The whole thing was too true by being not true at all.
And then she suddenly realized, as never before, that Paul’s infallible world, the world in which his greatness was real, the world of Erste Freundschaft, had nothing to do with either his actual behaviour in life or with his own ridiculous self-portrait. It was as if, indeed, words were a medium that, despite his skill with them, set him far off the tracks of truth. He posed in every sentence, and she remembered that his first success in journalism had been the exploitation of a pose that he himself had scorned. Perhaps that early experience had probed and explored a weakness, so that words were never afterwards to be his authentic weapon. And perhaps that was why, of every craft connected with the stage, he had always got along worst with writers; and perhaps that was also why, when he took to the camera, it was a release from chains, for in all his films there was none of this brawling self-love, but an integrity, a vision of life, and the sweetness of a ripe apple… All this came to her mind as she read the manuscript, and when she had finished it she wondered, not what to tell him, but how. The problem took such precedence, even over others she had, that she felt she must act quickly; she could not endure the thought of him sitting there in that dreary little room, happily engaged upon a task so inept. She drove to see him the next morning, climbing the eight half-flights with the resoluteness of one who intends at all costs to be frank. The real trouble, she expected, would not be to break the news gently but to make any impression at all on his own conviction that he could do no wrong.
“So you’ve read it already?” he exclaimed, when he saw the manuscript under her arm. “That’s GREAT! You just couldn’t stop, I suppose, once you tried a page or two?” He smiled indulgently as he pulled a chair for her. From the look of things he had been working hard at the continuation, and he saw her glance take in the typewriter and the littered table. “I think I have another couple of chapters for you,” he added proudly. “Now tell me all about it.”
“Paul… let me get my breath…”
“Yes, I know. Those stairs… But isn’t it good stuff? How did you like the part about our first meeting? That walk in Phoenix Park and my promise to direct you in a play—”
“That wasn’t our first meeting, Paul, and you didn’t promise to direct me… but it’s a fair sample of what’s wrong with the whole thing.”
“WRONG?”
“Yes, because it isn’t true. You’ve just made yourself a hero in everything—which wouldn’t matter so much except that you’re wasting your time doing this sort of thing at all. You’re not a writer. You’re a picture-maker. Your mind’s eye has no words.”
And now, she thought, regarding him dispassionately, let the heavens fall. He seemed preoccupied for a moment, as if holding some answer of his own in abeyance; then all he did was to take a cigar from his pocket and slowly light it—not at all the movement of an angry man. Presently he remarked: “Not bad, not bad. My mind’s eye has no words. I like that. Carve it on my tombstone. You know, Carey, I have an idea some time to make a picture without words at all. The old silents were almost an art when this horrible mess of verbiage dragged them down to the level of mere photographed stage plays. You’re pretty smart to perceive that.”
She hadn’t perceived it at all, but she was dazed by her own luck in finding a phrase that had so captivated him.
He went on, smoking tranquilly: “Do you think I’d waste time if there were anything else I could do?”
“Well, then, Paul, you MUST find some work, the kind you can do and love to do—otherwise you’ll soon become a rather silly old man with nothing but a collection of memories and grievances. Paul, why couldn’t you take any kind of job—at first—if it gave you a chance to make films?”
“ANY kind of job?”
“Not absolutely any kind—I mean a decent job, of course, but maybe not one that gives you all the freedom you’ve been used to… a job where you could prove how good you are to those who don’t already know it… a compromise, Paul. You’ll have to make one if you ever want to get back. Couldn’t you take a job—say—in one of the smaller studios —and on a not so very important picture—if it were offered you?”
“Directing?”
“Yes, naturally—though perhaps not with full control of everything. Hollywood doesn’t do things that way.”
“Ah, Hollywood.”
“Well, where else is there? Apparently you can’t go back to Europe.”
“So you o
ffer me a director’s job in Hollywood at a minor studio and on a B picture. Suppose I say I wouldn’t be interested?”
“Then I’d begin to lose all hope for you.”
“Suppose I said I WAS interested? How soon could I have the job?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know even if there is one. But if you say you’d take it, that’s the first step. Austen has influence—”
“Oh, Austen, Austen, AUSTEN. I wanted his money, and his answer was no. My answer’s the same now—to his influence. Damn his influence. No… NO… What sort of person do you think I am?”
“That’s what I’ve never been able to decide.”
She could see the answer amused him as he retorted: “Maybe YOU ought to write a book about it some day.”
“Except that I doubt if I could ever make the subject interesting enough.”
“Oho, so that’s how you feel? I bore you, eh?”
He never did and he never had, but she answered: “Yes, sometimes… and I’m in a hurry, I think I’d better be going.”
“You won’t even have coffee with me?”
“No, thanks. I really mustn’t stay as long as last time.”
“Next time I want you to have dinner with me.”
“No, I couldn’t do that.”
“Then when shall we meet again?”
“I can’t promise. But let me know how you are, and if you need anything… “
“So you find me a bore,” he repeated, not believing it at all (she could see), but turning over the idea in his mind as some abstract curiosity.
“I won’t argue, Paul.”
“You don’t even ADMIRE me any more?”
This was too much, so she began to smile. “I do admire you, in many ways. I might even admire your attitude towards Austen if I didn’t know it’s a mere gesture. You don’t REALLY feel like that about taking help from people —you haven’t that kind of pride—”
“False pride. Of course I haven’t. And look, Carey, gesture or not, I don’t want Austen putting in his little word for me anywhere. It’s not a matter of principle—much more important, it’s a whim. If you want me to do the kind of job you described—the compromise job—ask Michaelson to find me one. He’s been my agent for the past twenty years —time he did something.”
“All right,” she said, ignoring the further absurdity of that last remark. “I’ll go straight to Micky from here.” She was surprised that the idea hadn’t occurred to her earlier. “But I’ll have a cup of coffee with you first.”
* * * * *
Michaelson had been Paul’s agent too, in the old days before the European adventures. He was getting on in years now, and had taken on a junior whom he was grooming for partnership and to be his eventual successor. It was this comparative youngster whom Carey talked to when she called at the office on Forty-Second Street. He was very affable, assuming no doubt that she had come to announce herself in the market again for a good play; and this, being good business, was good news. But when she said she didn’t want a play, but would like to talk about Paul Saffron, he assumed the look of someone who, from then on, was prepared to listen merely from politeness.
“Do you know Paul Saffron well?” he asked, which she took to be convincing proof of how time could obliterate not only the memory of half a dozen successful plays but of gossip also, and even a breath of scandal.
The irony of it made her answer: “Fairly well. He’s one of your clients, anyway. Or didn’t you realize that?”
“Yes, Mr. Michaelson used to handle him—years ago—I guess that’s why he still considers himself attached to us. Otherwise I doubt whether…”
“I see.” She went on to explain what kind of job Paul wanted, how well qualified he was, and how high his reputation had been in Europe before the war. “Maybe you’ve seen his work. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call him one of the world’s great picture directors.”
She began to dislike the youth for the way he deliberately poker-faced before answering. “You really think that, Miss Arundel?”
“Yes, I do.”
He poker-faced again. “You know, you actresses can sell a lot of things —face cream, lipstick, cigarettes, home permanents, God knows what. But there’s one thing you can’t sell, and that’s Paul Saffron.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a Fascist.”
“WHAT?”
“He was mixed up with the Nazis during the war—did propaganda for them or something—”
“That’s not true! I know there’ve been all kinds of slanders about him—”
“All right, all right—so they’re slanders. Maybe. But people believe them. And he hasn’t enough friends who’ll SAY they’re slanders. You’re the first I’ve come across.”
They were still in the argument when Michaelson entered. He and Carey were old friends and greeted each other affectionately. He introduced her formally to the youth, mentioning the latter as “a bright lad… I hope he’s been telling you how glad we’ll be if you’re after another play.”
“I’m not, Micky. I came to talk about Paul—your bright lad didn’t know he was once my husband.”
The youth was not in the least discomfited. “I knew, Miss Arundel, but I thought I could be franker with you if I pretended I didn’t.”
He left the room, at a signal from Michaelson. She said, ruefully: “So I guess he IS a bright lad.”
“Sure… Now what is it about Paul?”
She went through the whole thing again, but to a kindlier audience. At the end he said: “Well, Carey, what Joe told you wasn’t far off the mark. It’s going to be pretty hard to sell Paul anywhere.”
“Because of the lies that are going around?”
“Partly that. And also because Hollywood has ‘em all listed either hot or cold, and Paul’s like ice—at the moment. Now if it were you, I could make a deal by picking up the phone. You don’t know how many enquiries I’ve had—I don’t even bother you about them, because I know how you feel. Look, I say to them, Miss Arundel isn’t interested in pictures, she’s married to a millionaire, you just haven’t an angle with her… But you’re hot, Carey. I think I could ask a hundred thousand for one picture and no quibbling.”
“Micky, let’s get back to Paul. He’ll go to pieces if he doesn’t find a job soon. They must know his pictures made money in Europe.”
“Most of them don’t know and none of them care.”
“I suppose they take more notice of the lies put out by enemies.”
“Look, Carey, it isn’t only that. Paul has a reputation for being difficult, and there’s nothing worse when you want a job. People who ever worked with him don’t forget what he was like—he’s not a man you CAN forget. If he were on top, they’d all say what a wonderful experience they had, but now he’s out, so they all say what a son of a bitch he was. And he was too, let’s face it. I used to quarrel with him so many times I lost count, and when he called on me recently after he got back from Europe he was just as impossible as ever. How he managed to make pictures for the Germans I’ll never know—”
“He didn’t. That’s one of the lies, Micky—”
“I meant BEFORE the war—don’t get so excited. The good pictures he made—they were for the Germans, weren’t they?”
“They were for the world.”
“Oh, come now, he made them in Germany, they were German language films —nothing wrong about that, mind you—”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m being silly. I’m sorry.”
“Sure, I understand. You like the fellow. So do I—in a way. But as I said, I’ve often wondered how he managed to get on with them over there. Maybe it’s what they go for—the Wagner type. Highbrows and headaches.”
“No, Micky, that’s wrong too. He’s not highbrow. His pictures have been POPULAR.”
“Not in Paducah, Kentucky. That’s the hurdle he has to cross.”
“So you think there’s nothing can be done?”
“I shou
ld say at present, not a thing. Unless you want me to fix up a package deal for both of you? Then somebody would have to take the pill to get the jam.”
He had said this as a joke to lighten the tension on Carey’s face; and she did indeed respond, but he saw the laugh drain away into a look of different tension. She said quietly: “Could you really make a deal like that with someone in Hollywood?”
“Sure. You can make any kind of deal if you have something to offer that somebody wants. During the liquor shortage I once sold an actor because I could throw in a dozen cases of Scotch.”
“Well… go ahead and sell Paul along with me.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I am.”
From habit he pulled a pencil and scratch-pad towards him, then pushed them away again. “No, I won’t need to remind myself of this. You’re sure it’s not a gag?”
“I’m serious,” she assured him again.
They discussed details, and just before she left his office he said: “Your personal affairs are none of my business, Carey, but it’s only fair to mention one thing… people are going to draw a certain conclusion from all this.”
“That I’m doing it to get Paul a job? I don’t see why they’ll know that if you don’t tell them.”
“It’ll leak out from the other end, you bet… but that wasn’t what I meant. The big conclusion they’ll draw is that you’re leaving your husband and going back to Paul.”
That startled her. “Yes, I suppose they will. It’s not true, but I can’t help it… It’s NOT true, Micky—it’s almost comic, when I think of it. I could never go back to Paul. You believe me, don’t you?”