She said, continuing to smile: “Looks as if we’re both getting to be a couple of old crocks.”
“WHAT? Oh, nonsense!”
“I was only joking. My trouble isn’t serious at all, I’m glad to say. The doctor assured me I’d be all right if I take care. Try to get a little rest in the afternoons, he said. I do, don’t I—in between scenes and rehearsals? And don’t let household worries weigh on you. Well, I haven’t any, that’s one blessing… As he took me to the door, he said—‘You know, Mrs. Bond, your face reminds me of someone.’ I thought he was going to say Carey Arundel and I got all prepared to be gracious, but he went on —‘A girl who was a hostess on United Airlines—were you ever one, by any chance?’ I told him no, and he looked quite sad.”
“He DID?” Paul exclaimed with abrupt and cheerful interest. “What sort of a man was he?… No, don’t tell me—I’ve got a concept of him in my mind already—middle-aged, quiet, hard worker, faithful husband, respectable citizen… but all the time he’s carried a vision of a girl he once saw in a plane… he never spoke to her—just watched as she walked about serving meals and checking seat-belts… a short trip, say Dallas to El Paso—two hours out of a whole lifetime. He fell in love with her then, if he’d realized it, but he didn’t, he was shy, he didn’t know his own mind enough to follow it, he wasn’t the type to say ‘Hello, sweetheart’ and ask for a date, he didn’t even remember her name afterwards… but as the years go by he can’t forget her, she becomes a symbol of the unattainable, the pluperfect subjunctive—sometimes he sees people—strangers, new patients—who remind him of her, or he thinks they do… One of these days he’s going to leave his home, his wife, his patients—everything—and search the world for that girl… Ah, that could be a PICTURE, Carey. Not junk like Morning Journey.”
She laughed at the suddenness with which Morning Journey had ceased to be a near-masterpiece; she laughed at his improvisation and at his own mounting enthusiasm for it; she laughed at his growing use of slang and epithets, to which he gave a peculiar emphasis, as of a foreigner waiting to be commended for having picked them up. And she laughed, finally, because in the mood she was in she felt hysterically relieved by doing so.
She said: “Magnificent, Paul. But he’s not middle-aged, he’s quite young, and he’s not married—he told me that—and I think he was just making conversation to get me out of his office.”
The crew and actors were beginning to drift in for the afternoon session. As at the pulling of a mental switch Paul returned to duty, and Morning Journey rose again in his favour.
He often improvised like that—the slightest cue could send him off into the synopsis of an imagined picture. Once Greg said seriously: “Paul, why don’t you get that down in writing and send it up to the front office? It’s so damned good you ought to be able to sell it.”
“SELL it?” Paul exclaimed, incredulously. “Why should I sell it? It’s MINE.”
* * * * *
He made more trouble (it seemed he couldn’t help it, despite all his promises), yet Carey had never admired him so much as during those latter days of making Morning Journey. There was something exquisite in his care for detail, especially when one thought of the mass audience to whom minutiae would not count, even if they were observed; he knew everybody’s business, much to their dismay at times—he seemed to be an expert on everything for which special experts had already been provided. Randolph barely tolerated him, visiting the set more rarely as the picture neared its end, evidently feeling that bad or good, the die was sufficiently cast. Two things should have made Paul popular with the authorities—the fewness of his takes and the fact that he was bringing in the picture several days under schedule; but Paul had an unrivalled capacity for sacrificing credit even where it was due, and Randolph, whose own direction had always been of the laborious sort, found it impossible to believe that so many printed first takes could show good judgment. To him Paul was possibly a genius, but certainly the kind of employee one could not handle; and as the somewhat peculiar packaging of Carey and Paul together in the contract had not been his responsibility, his real hope was that the picture should fail gently enough for the studio to try Carey in another picture and get rid of Paul altogether. Perhaps he, Randolph, might even direct her himself in the next picture—it would be exciting to get on the floor again. He liked Carey. She was a bit old for stardom—no older, though, than Madeleine Carroll and almost as beautiful; she had that indefinable thing called “class”, and with co-stars like Greg Wilson there was no reason why Majestic Pictures should not use her a good deal. But for less money, if Morning Journey failed. Her agent, of course, would hold out for the same, would keep on reminding everyone she was married to a millionaire, but maybe that wouldn’t be true much longer if the rumours one heard were correct. Randolph turned it all over in his mind many times as he sat at his desk after seeing the daily rushes. He and Paul did not see them at the same time now, and Carey and Greg did not now see them at all. That was Paul’s doing too— he had reverted to an old idea of his that watching themselves in the previous day’s scenes was bad for actors. What puzzled Randolph was how Paul could have forced such a ruling on Greg. All Greg had to say was, “You go to hell, Saffron, I’m seeing the rushes just as I’ve always seen ‘em”— but for some reason Greg did not say it. That was disturbing, too, when Randolph thought it over.
* * * * *
The peculiarity of this film environment was that one could live in a large American city week after week without feeling intimate with it, without even feeling that it was part of America. The apartment Carey had was of standardized luxury, the restaurants she patronized catered to people like herself, the morning and evening travel in the studio limousine was through streets that all looked the same, with the same stores and bill-boards, the same shadow and sunshine. Even the ocean was somehow disappointing as an ocean. But she loved the mountains twenty or thirty miles away, and solely to drive to them whenever she had a few hours to spare she rented a rather smart convertible.
The studio was the real world—or rather, an unreal world which she explored sometimes with Paul when there were outdoor scenes on the back lot and she could make him take a walk during the lunch hour. The maze of streets and alleys there, where one could step from brownstone New York to Elizabethan England in a few seconds, the stranded Pullman on the two-hundred-yard track, the small-town main street with its false-fronted store buildings—all this was fascinating, a symbol (Paul said) of a world in which emotions themselves were false-fronted (“Tell me any picture Majestic ever made that wasn’t”), and in which the symbols of life became substitutes for life itself. “Here on this back lot,” Paul said one day, improvising himself into a tourist guide, “are all the signposts of our civilization, from the little red schoolhouse where you learn to the prison death-house where you burn…” He went on in this fashion, considerably enjoying himself, but she was hardly listening; her mind was preoccupied with a letter she had received from Norris that morning, for he had mentioned in it quite casually that he was getting bored in New York and had thought of coming out to see her, and also to meet Paul. Ordinarily there would have been nothing especially disturbing about this, yet it did disturb her, because she knew that Paul and Norris would not get along, and that an extra burden of peace-making would fall upon her. Frankly, with so much else to do, she could not endure the thought of it. As Paul went on talking she could hear in her mind Norris answering him back and the whole argument that would follow. It would be impossible—that on top of everything else.
Within an hour during an interval between scenes, she scribbled a note from her dressing-room:
“… Darling, don’t think me inhospitable or that I wouldn’t love to see you, but I really don’t think you ought to come out here just now, it wouldn’t be worth your while, I assure you, because I’m busy all day and have to learn lines in the evening for the next day—this job is really work, though you mightn’t think so from all the glamorous stuff you read in the m
agazines. Please don’t come, therefore—if you did you’d be at a completely loose end most of the time, and I can tell you this is a dull city to wander about on your own. I doubt if I could even get permission for you to visit the picture set—the rules are very strict against anyone who hasn’t a business reason. As for Paul, he hasn’t time for anybody, and as always when he’s directing he’s inclined to be bad-tempered with strangers. I’d hate you to get a wrong impression of him (for he can be very charming at other times), but I’m afraid you would if you met him nowadays. Perhaps later on, some time, when the job’s finished and we can all relax. I’m glad to report that the picture itself is going pretty well—as soon as they ship a print to New York I’ll try to arrange for you to see it in advance in a projection-room…”
Norris sent no immediate answer to this, and for several weeks she was in constant apprehension that every ring from the lobby would announce his arrival.
Then one morning another of his letters came—from Rio de Janeiro.
“… the first few legs of a trip that will end up when and where I don’t exactly know, maybe the bank that father is so keen on shoving me in. You remember I once said that he DEVOTED himself to his job—I can see now it’s the right word for something that does have a faintly religious air about it. Everywhere that we’ve stopped, so far—Havana, Mexico City, Caracas—there’ve been exalted personages meeting us at airports, sometimes even in morning coats and top hats—it’s been a revelation to me what a big shot he is, or must have been during the war, though I still can’t quite fathom what his job was—something to do with government loans and currency, of course, but that doesn’t give away much, and nor does he. But it’s rather fascinating to get an impression of his importance from the way he moves around and meets people—it reminds me a bit of the Acts of the Apostles—you know, CONFIRMING THE CHURCHES. And he does also move in a mysterious way—father, I mean. Perhaps he’s right, after all, and the bank wouldn’t be a bad solution for me—at least for the time being. Oh God, I don’t know—what do YOU think I ought to do? He thinks I’ve given up the medical school idea and perhaps I have —it’s hard, out here, to face the kind of opposition I know he’d put up. This must be all for now, there’s a business conference going on in the next room, so it’s a chance for me to write. Incidentally, Richards is with us, as a sort of valet and general what-not. We stay here a week or two, then go on to Montevideo, Uruguay, the Hotel Bolivar…”
That evening she wrote to both of them, yet there was nothing particular she felt she could say, partly because she suspected Richards might intercept her letters. She therefore assembled another instalment of the chatter she had been sending all along, and to which Austen had not replied by a single line. HIS MYSTERIOUS WAY. The phrase stuck in her mind unhappily, not so much for its wry meaning, as because of her distress that Norris should have been in a mood to employ it. It seemed to signify a return to the cynicism of his boyhood, but now without boyhood as an excuse.
During those days she was immensely glad she had work, and that Paul could magnetize her to it so exhaustingly. The picture was making good progress and even he seemed satisfied, though the deferred problem of the cutting loomed larger on his mind as the job approached completion. One lunch-time, after a morning off, she arrived at the studio to find him stretched out full length on the couch of her dressing-room, eyes closed and a cigar in his hand, declaiming in a way which she took at first to be a speech from some newly minted dialogue but which, after a few sentences, she knew could not be that; it sounded more like an impassioned address to the stockholders of Majestic Pictures Incorporated, imploring them to unseat the existing board and replace them with men who would have greater consideration for art and artists. Actually, as Paul explained readily enough when she broke in on his oration: “I was just getting my thoughts together. We’re going to have a fight, you know, about the cutting. I’ll try not to drag you into it.”
“I’ll try not to be dragged in, but I know I will be.”
“If it’s cut properly it’s a good picture. Not great, but good.”
“Let’s hope it’s a success too.”
He went on smoking. “Oh, by the way, how’s your heart?”
“Not so bad. It’ll be all right if I don’t work too hard.”
“You had nothing to do all this morning.”
“Yes, I had one whole morning—wasn’t that wonderful? What happened while I was away?”
“Writers on the warpath again. You’d think those fellows had written the Bible.”
“What was the trouble this time?”
“The same sort of thing. I couldn’t use any of their barber-shop stuff.”
She knew the scene—it came earlier in the picture than the one in the woodcutter’s cottage, though later in the shooting schedule… Greg, alone, is forced during this stage of his escape to pass through a town by daylight; he knows he is being hunted and that the hunters may already have picked up the scent. As he hurries through the streets he has a sudden impulse to throw off any possible pursuer by disappearing into a shop, and the one that seems most suitable is a barber shop, where he will have an excuse to stay some time. He has a day’s growth of beard and knows the language well enough to ask for a shave. While he is being lathered he sees (through a big mirror) that someone is entering the shop and scanning the faces of customers. This man, Greg feels sure, is looking for him. He figures that his only chance is to do something that will eliminate him from suspicion; and this, in the circumstances, is to do something that will immediately focus attention on him. So with a muttered “Excuse me a moment” to the barber, AND WITH HIS FACE STILL LATHERED, he gets up from the chair, walks right past his pursuer to the rack on which he has hung his overcoat, takes a handkerchief from its pocket, gives his nose a startling blast, and returns to the chair. The pursuer observes him, but (as was intended) automatically puts him out of mind, for surely a man on the run would not deliberately and needlessly draw attention to himself? (Such reasoning being unconscious and therefore all the more reliable, according to Paul.) After completing his scrutiny of others in the shop, the pursuer leaves and the lathered man smiles gently as he submits to the razor.
Once again a scene practically without dialogue, and once again different from the pages of the script. In these the pursuer had recognized Greg and there had been a męlée with shots fired and mirrors broken; Greg had eventually managed to escape through a back door. If, therefore, Paul’s scene could have been called over-subtle, the one it replaced had no subtlety at all. But it would have played well enough, and the original dialogue between Greg and the pursuer had been of the tried and true variety— “Put ‘em up or I’ll shoot”—“You think you’ve got me, do you? Stand back, you—” etc. etc.
The writers had urged on Randolph that Paul’s scene, both as to incident and motivation, would not be understood by an average audience, and Randolph (miffed because once again a vital change had been made at the last moment without consulting him) had agreed with them.
“And what’s going to happen?” Carey asked.
“Who cares any more about that?” Paul began to chuckle. “It’s happened. I shot the scene my way.”
“Oh dear, you’re very obstinate.”
“OBSTINATE? ME? After all my compromises?”
“Paul, do you know what the word compromise means?”
“Sure—it’s what I’m doing now by working on a picture like this at all. The only thing it can be, at best, is a bag of tricks. Well, that’s all right—I don’t expect them to let me produce a work of art. But if it’s going to be a bag of tricks, for God’s sake let the tricks be tricky enough. And that’s what really beats me, Carey—here’s this business of telling stories by means of tiny photographs—it’s just about fifty years old—fifty out of the thousands since people began telling stories at all—yet already there are factory rules laid down— mustn’t do this, mustn’t do that… And you call me obstinate because I dare to answer: TRY I
T! See if an audience is as dumb as you think! There they are —the groundlings—all crunching popcorn just like Shakespeare’s crowd at the Globe if there’d been popcorn in those days—all you have to do is to give them a Twelfth Night—it doesn’t have to be a Hamlet every time!”
“I’d like to see you shooting Hamlet, Paul—you’d cut half the lines.”
“So would Shakespeare if he’d had a camera to play with.”
“You must admit, though, you do seem to have a special grudge against dialogue.”
“No, not a grudge at all—only a realization of what films have done in their first fifty years. They’ve broken the bottleneck of words that we’ve all endured for centuries—they’ve challenged the scholars and grammarians who built their little private fences round enlightenment— they’ve freed us from the thraldom of Gutenberg!… You’ve heard some of the old jokes about producers out here who’re supposed to be illiterate? Too bad the breed seems to be dying out—I think I could have got along with one of them better than with Randolph. Because that fellow READS. God, how he reads! He and his wife, when they get hold of what they think is a good book, d’you know what they do? THEY READ TO EACH OTHER ALOUD. From chair to chair and bed to bed—a chapter apiece every evening! He TOLD me… and with a straight face!”
Paul’s guffaws lasted for some time, and Carey laughed more moderately, reflecting that, for all his tirade against books and Gutenberg, there could be few people on earth who had read more. During the periods of his life when he had been out of a job he had borrowed five or six books a day from public libraries, and when he had been earning money he had usually come home with purchased books under his arm. He had probably spent more time in Brentano’s than in all other New York shops put together. And she had rarely heard anyone mention a play or a playwright or an episode of theatrical or dramatic history that he did not seem to know plenty about. It was true he was not a scholar in the pedagogic sense, but his range was wider—he had an artist’s acquaintance with all the arts, plus a technician’s familiarity with all the theatrical arts, plus an immense if disordered store of general knowledge. He would probably have been a great success on Information Please… But of course the way he digested books was photographic; he could acquire the sense of pages without taking words consecutively, and the notion of his ever reading aloud a whole chapter of anything or wishing her to read him one, was certainly comic. Sometimes, when she had been driving the car in those old days, she had asked him to read her the headlines in the paper, but before he was through a couple of them he had usually launched into comments or fulminations that had made her exclaim: “Darling, will you please read me what it says and leave what you think about it till afterwards.”