She could have endured and even come to enjoy the strain of satisfying Paul as an actress had there been less to do as trouble-shooter. The ancient contrast appeared again in full force—that most people liked her a great deal while few could like Paul except with a degree of partisanship that made them just as difficult to handle themselves. (Among these few were several actors and a negro set-boy for whom he had performed some unexplained kindness.) The trouble was that there were so many more possible antagonisms on a movie stage than in a theatre—so many more rules, written and unwritten, to be despised and challenged; so many more taboos to tilt against, so many more egos to affront. Typical, perhaps, was the row with the musicians. The scene called for Carey to play the piano, which she did on a silent keyboard while a professional pianist dubbed in from the background. Paul’s first complaint was that the pianist played too well; after a second try, Paul complained that he played too badly. Paul then went to the piano, played the thing himself, and declared himself thoroughly satisfied. “There’s all the difference,” he said, “between a non-professional playing as well as he can and a professional deliberately playing less well than he can.” Perhaps there was, but there also happened to be Petrillo’s union that would not let Paul play at all. It took an hour or more to convince him that he could not fight Petrillo, and several days to appease the musicians who considered themselves slighted by the whole incident.
Then there was his refusal to admit strangers to the set and his rudeness to a New York executive (and principal Majestic stockholder) who assumed that rules did not apply to him. There were also scenes with the camera-man, who regarded his machine as a Copernican sun round which the picture should revolve, whereas to Paul it was an Einsteinian eye that must move relatively to the actors all the time. Furthermore, Paul wanted to select the lens and teach the man his job; as he was a veteran who had worked for Essanay in nickelodeon days he took this very ill indeed, and the fact that Paul knew all the mechanics of camera work did not mollify him. The sultriest arguments they had were over Paul’s frequent use of dolly and boom, which caused extra trouble and higher costs. Yet in another way Paul’s methods were too economical to be popular; both camera crew and stage-hands liked a director whose many takes gave them plenty of idleness on the set. But Paul was often satisfied with the first take, and took a second only for protection. His procedure was to rehearse and rehearse, with the camera going through all the motions of the shooting and the camera-man doing what he was told instead of presiding over a mystery.
But of all disputes the fiercest were with the writers, since to begin with, Paul had disliked both story and script. The former, supposed to be based on a novel, had really retained little but the title, and this, for all that it signified, might just as well (had they not been used before) have been Gone With the Wind or If Winter Comes. As for the script, Paul claimed it was intolerably wordy; “Nobody talks like that in life”, he kept on saying, though with scornful inconsistency he could agree that many people did, if they attended movies often enough. A rewrite, made after heated conferences, resulted in a second version hardly more to his taste, but by that time the shooting date was near and there was no time for a further rewrite. Nor, to be frank, was Paul at all anxious to have one. He was perfectly satisfied to doctor the script himself as he went along, thinning out dialogue, changing background, inventing incidents, introducing new facets to character, and generally playing God. The writers had every reason to hate him, but since also they were pretty good writers they were even fascinated by him a little, as by a cross unlikely to be inflicted on them again. One of them took him aside after an especially stormy argument and said, almost affectionately: “Look, Mr. Saffron, you haven’t been here long —you don’t know the way things work. Maybe, as you say, there’s too much dialogue in pictures, but what the hell do you expect us to do— turn out a script full of stage directions? You know nobody ever takes any notice of what a writer wants actors to DO—only of what he gives them to SAY. Ever seen a top executive looking over a script? Unless you can make him yell ‘Boy, oh boy, what dialogue!’ you’re out of luck… So you see how it is, Mr. Saffron?”
“All I see,” Paul answered, “is that Mendelssohn would have been in trouble here for writing Lieder ohne Worte.”
The writers laughed and appreciated him more for this and other sallies than he did them for their considerable patience. There was no doubt that he had never really liked writers since the day he had ceased to be one himself. Of course he would show respect to literary eminence, and in the presence of business men he could even feel distant kinship with any writer at all, as with any muralist or trumpet player or landscape gardener; but as a rule he was on constant guard. Stage playwrights especially he had always been wary of, since they had a relatively privileged status and even he could not cut and change their work without a semblance of permission. But his more recent and heightened hostility had actually sprung from a war-time neurosis; in the prison camp he had seen a few writers occasionally writing, and their self- containedness, their ability to work with a pencil and a scrap of paper in relative secrecy and in disregard of events, had rubbed raw his own grandiose frustrations. It was thus in part a pathological grudge, and now the chance to pay it off was unique. Always quick to grasp a situation before he knew the reasons for it, he had soon sensed that Majestic’s professional scenarists, even when high-salaried, carried none of the prestige of the older kinds of writer; so that at long last he had the breed where he wanted it—in subservience to the over-all authority of the show-maker —i.e. himself. It was the one point on which, without realizing it, he was in full agreement with the studio heads—though they, of course, set themselves above him with an equal degree of arrogance.
Finally, he was at odds with the publicity department and the columnists who wrote movie stuff for newspapers and fan magazines. He did not trouble to understand their function, but let them know that even if he did he would probably despise it. On first reading gossip items that he and Carey were contemplating a reconciliation, he had snorted contemptuously, and when asked if it were true had denied it with an emphasis that might have sounded ungallant had not Carey been with him to laugh and back him up. But of course the rumour stayed in circulation, only weakened slightly by an alternative theory that Carey was interested in her leading man. She was; she liked Greg Wilson very much. They often dined and were seen together.
Greg was a big, jovial forty-seven, and quite sensationally handsome. By careful make-up and constant attention to physique he had been playing parts of twenty-five-year-olds so long that there was a certain puppy quality in his entire behaviour and personality. Two marriages had failed, possibly because he was less exciting in life than on the screen; he had now for several years been alone, popular, and extremely eligible. He was also Majestic’s biggest and therefore most privileged money-maker, playing golf with the studio heads and fringeing on the kind of society that did not normally admit movie people at all. A likeable fellow, whose love scenes were so wooden that women imagined what it must be like to teach him. He found it hard to memorize more than a few lines at a time. When it was conveyed to him (not over-subtly) that Paul had not wanted him in the picture, he said: “For Pete’s sake, why should he? I don’t blame him.” When he met Carey he made it almost too clear that he was smitten; actually he wasn’t, but he enjoyed thinking he was. He had all the bluff open-air reactions to most things that his screen characters had—except one reaction that nobody could have foreseen and that had certainly not been foreshadowed in any part he had ever played. This was a curious attachment that he developed to Paul. Paul, he went around telling people, was the greatest director he had ever known. “Look!” he exclaimed, when he saw the daily rushes. “Would you ever believe that’s ME?” There was something warm and engaging about him, and Carey found him a constant ally in her efforts to smooth out troubles that arose from Paul’s behaviour on and off the set.
* * * * *
Those d
ays of the shooting of Morning Journey passed for her in a curious enclosed dream.
She heard from Norris—a warm, friendly note, not very long, discussing mostly the books he had been reading, telling little of affairs at the house. He mentioned that Austen would soon leave on a business trip to South America and had suggested he should go along with him, but he didn’t know whether he wanted to.
She wrote a long chatty letter in reply, the kind Austen could see if it so happened, describing her work, the progress of the picture, and the life she was living. She added that the South American trip sounded exciting, maybe it was the sort of change he needed.
She did not hear from Austen, but to him also she wrote a long chatty letter, describing her work, the progress of the picture, and the life she was living.
It was certainly a hard one, much more so than she had expected. She was up most mornings by six, to be ready on the set by eight for hair-dressing and make-up. Paul was always there by then, having stayed up all night (she sometimes concluded) to rewrite the scenes. She and Paul lived in apartments several miles from each other; their first meeting of the day was on the sound stage, and in the evenings, even if they dined together at a restaurant, they rarely said good-night later than ten. On Saturdays she allowed herself to accept party invitations; Sunday was a day of rest unless Greg Wilson drove her to the mountains or the sea. He bored her a little when he talked almost continually about Paul. His favourite remark was that he didn’t know how two such wonderful people could ever have separated, and once he varied this by saying he couldn’t understand how she could ever have let Paul go.
“But I didn’t let him go,” she answered. “He let me go.”
“Oh,” Greg exclaimed and was then silent, as if her reply had led him to an entirely new train of thought.
Sometimes during the lunch recess she and Paul would sit in her dressing-room with sandwiches and coffee, and this was really the quietest time they ever had together, certainly the most intimate. There were few places more peaceful than a studio sound stage during this hour-long interval; the big lights were out, technicians and actors had all left the job, sound-proof doors were closed, the huge building with its high roof, dark interior, and mysterious shapes of equipment and scenery had the air of a cathedral dedicated to some new and strange religion. Paul was human enough then to fall asleep, or smoke his big cigars, or talk of anything that came into his head, or even rehearse something privately with her if he wanted. And she in turn would hear his complaints, give him advice, and sometimes coax him into a more amenable attitude for the afternoon. “Paul,” she kept saying till it was almost a refrain, “DO remember what a chance you have. I know you aren’t getting all your own way, but you’re getting a lot, and if this turns out a good picture you’ll be able to ask for much more. DO make compromises. You’re so good, Paul, you’ll have all you want if you’ll only play your cards properly now.”
He would often talk to her, in staccato and seemingly unrelated snatches, about his experiences in Europe, though there was one period he rarely mentioned, even inferentially—and that was his three years in the internment camp. Like certain other parts of his life it was clearly destined for obliteration in his memory—the final anathema that his ego pronounced on hostile eventfulness. What he did remember, constantly, were incidents in earlier films of his that illustrated some point in Morning Journey. As he progressed further with the picture and revamped more of it to suit himself, it naturally rose in his estimation till he began to feel about it almost as he had done about a new play before opening night—i.e. that it was a masterpiece. ALMOST—but not quite, for the different conditions of picture-making involved so many other persons over whom he had no control, and whom, therefore, he could not exalt by such comprehensive praise.
A specific scene in Morning Journey called for Carey to show by her expression the horror of discovering hate in the eyes of someone she had thought loved her—a difficult emotion, and Paul had rehearsed the scene several times without being completely satisfied. During the lunch hour that day he told her of a scene in one of his German pictures in which the situation was as follows. A wife had been having an affair with a much younger man who was already tiring of it. At the crisis of a bitter quarrel, the woman turned a revolver on herself; the youth managed to wrest it from her and the quarrel then continued more hotly than ever. At a second crisis he became so incensed that, still holding the woman’s revolver, he pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. There was no report, and the woman’s eyes conveyed what had happened. SHE had known, but HE had not, that the weapon was unloaded. SHE had been merely putting on an act to impress him, but HE had been actually ready to kill her.
“I didn’t speak much German in those days,” Paul added, “and when I rehearsed the scene I told the actors to say anything they wanted to make it sound like a quarrel. Later on we had a writer, but I never even bothered to have his lines translated for me. It was the woman’s expression I was aiming for—the awful awareness in it. I got what I wanted too, because she was Wanda Hessely and Wanda could do anything. Remember her? You met her at Interlaken that time.”
“Yes, but I’m not as good an actress, you said.”
“That’s so. But you’re good enough.”
“And her scene was easier.”
“No—just as hard.”
“Anything’s easier with guns and things to play with.”
“Try it then.”
“Our scene?”
“No—the one she did. I’ll play the man. This is your gun.” He picked up the metal tube that had contained one of his big cigars. “Adlib the dialogue—anything… let’s go… Why not? Can’t do any harm.”
They went through the scene after a fashion, but Carey was less adept at improvising dialogue than Paul, and it struck her amidst her own difficulty that in adlibbing a quarrel he was very much on his home ground. The whole experiment was not very satisfactory and they ended by laughing. “Maybe it’s helped, though,” Paul said.
“By the way,” she asked, “what happened to Wanda Hessely?”
He shrugged. “There was a rumour she was killed in one of the Berlin air raids.”
“Oh dear, I hope not.”
He exclaimed sharply: “You what? You hope not? You dare to hope that out of all the millions of innocent people slaughtered during those horrible years SHE should have been spared—just because you happened to meet her once! What sublime egotism!”
The remark was so startlingly outrageous that she would have flared up but for the look she caught in time—the look that told her, out of long experience, that he had spoken thus to conceal some deep feeling of his own. He had always been like that, and only for a short time, just after their marriage, had she been able to free him a little. It was the more curious because in his work he was superbly free; without sentimentality or shrinking he could examine and expose the tenderest emotions. But off duty, so to say, certain rigidities clamped down, engendering even a perverse desire to appear callous, so that it was often at such moments that he said things that were most remembered against him.
She said, as to a child: “Don’t be silly, Paul.”
* * * * *
One evening, on impulse, she visited a doctor—not a fashionable one, or a specialist of any kind—just a local man whose office she had noticed near her apartment. She had begun to feel a peculiar tiredness lately, to which broken sleep had doubtless added. The doctor listened to her vague description of symptoms, examined her heart, and asked what was making her so nervous. She said she didn’t know. He then fumbled a few questions that would soon have led to an intimate discussion of her personal affairs, but she discouraged him and he ended by telling her she had a slight heart condition, nothing serious provided she avoided overwork and, above all things, did not worry. He advised a vacation if she could take one and she promised she would, very soon. She thanked him then, paid his fee, and felt both relieved and somehow much older as she left his office.
r /> She told Paul of her visit the next morning. Rather to her surprise he took the matter anxiously and was extremely solicitous. “Oh my God, Carey —we’ll have to look after you, won’t we? Less work from now on— I’ll watch it—to hell with their schedule—we’re ahead of time, anyhow. No shooting after five o’clock—I’ll make that a rule.”
“It isn’t so much the work, Paul,” she ventured to remonstrate. “It’s trying to pacify everybody you quarrel with, and having to talk Randolph into a good humour, and being nice to newspaper people after you’ve made enemies of them all… if only you’d spare me some of that.”
“I will,” he promised abjectly. “I know I’m to blame in a lot of things. And we just can’t have you getting ill. I know what illness is—I’m not a completely well man myself.” She smiled at that, remembering that whenever anyone else had ever mentioned the slightest ailment of any kind Paul had always been able to match it with some private and hitherto undisclosed martyrdom of his own. But now he said, so calmly that she felt he might be speaking the truth: “One or two things happened in that camp I was in—shocking things that I wouldn’t ever tell anyone about. They made me ill and I started getting headaches. Migraine. They don’t come so often now, except when I have fights.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Then that’s another reason why you shouldn’t have fights.”
“Yes, yes.” He clapped his hand dramatically to his head. “I must take care. I know I must.”