One of Jack Dorney’s clubs is traditionally theatrical and he goes there less frequently than to his other club, which has taken in perhaps a dozen actors in its history. He avoids the theatrical club for much the same reasons that he takes taxis at Sixtieth Street. There has always been some mystery about his getting into the society club, but enough of the right people made their move at the right time, and he got in ahead of some more obviously eligible candidates. He had gone to a rather second-rate prep school in New Jersey, and could claim relationship with no prestigious family, but he had been a 4-handicap golfer and sailed a succession of small boats, and in his Hollywood days had kept out of messes. Upon moving to New York he made himself agreeable to the men who like to play golf with celebrities who could come in with a 72, and they thought well enough of him to take him to lunch at the society club and eventually to ease him in to membership. It was a completely masculine operation: none of his sponsors knew his wife. But there were members of the club who had got in through their wives’ connections, and they had not always turned out for the best. The men who supported his candidacy assumed that if he had stayed married to the same woman for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, she must be all right. He was a good fellow, so she was probably all right after all those years. He never said much about her, but somehow you got the impression that she kept busy with charity work or an interior decorating business that she was interested in. The Dorneys have no children—no son who might turn out to be an embarrassment when he was old enough to be put up for the club, no daughter who could create problems of getting her invited to the debutante dances. Jack was just a darn good fellow who had made a lot of money in the movie business and played awfully nice golf and was about as little actorish as he could possibly be, considering. In his quiet way he fitted in very nicely, and as a matter of fact it was something of a relief to go to the club and see at least one face that was not the same old run of Porcellian and Keys and Ivy kissers, one generation after another of the St. Grottlesex types. Not that Jack Dorney was strange-looking, or that he wore actorish clothes, but you could not help remembering that he was Jack Dorney the movie actor even if you didn’t think much about it when you saw him in the bar or having lunch with one of the St. Grottlesex types.
After lunch he often goes to the midtown branch of his broker, to get there before the market closes. It is a pleasant place, a prolongation of the club atmosphere, and the men he sees there have long been accustomed to his presence. He is by way of being a specialist in a few stocks but he is a cautious trader and sometimes weeks go by without his giving the broker an order. Then he will make a little joke about giving the broker a commission so that he will continue to be welcome in the office, with its comfortable chairs and air conditioning. But the brokers have learned that there is nothing casual about the transactions, which usually take place in the last half hour before the closing of business and are nearly always profitable for Jack Dorney. He is said to have a feel for the market. This he denies. “The doorman at my apartment gives me my feel for the market,” he says. “He’s a nut on astrology, and every morning he tells me what kind of a day I’m going to have. That’s my feel for the market.” But he has also said that if he can make $100 a day, it comes to $30,000 a year, which is better than being a big operator and losing $5 a year. He has a horror of having to dip into capital.
After the market closes and he and his brokerage acquaintances have second-guessed the day’s trading, he goes to a movie, to his dentist, to wherever and whatever will keep him engaged until five-thirty or six, and then he goes home.
The apartment is small, with an unstylish elegance that Celeste Dorney acquired in the Hollywood days. There is a Marie Laurencin in the foyer and a Raphael Soyer in the sitting-room, but not much of Jack Dorney’s movie money was spent on pictures. The sitting-room is, as the decorators used to say, busy, with a profusion of jade, Meissen, cameo, Josiah Wedgwood, bell pulls, mirrors of all sizes, cloisonné, clusters of miniatures, porcelain snuff boxes, sterling ashtrays, a Lalique clock that stopped running in 1951, a crystal candelabrum with too-short candles, and a rather startling portrait-in-oils of Jack Dorney in the role of a Confederate captain that won him an Academy award. The baby grand piano is closed and on it rest a dozen silver-framed photographs of movie stars, directors, and producers. Against the wall is a portable bar, equipped with a sterling ice bucket and cocktail shaker, a few glasses, and a set of cut-glass bottles for Scotch, bourbon, rye, gin, vodka, and vermouth, each having a sterling label on a chain around the bottleneck.
“Oh, you’re home,” she says. He hangs his coat and hat in the foyer closet and goes to her and kisses her cheek.
“Back again, same day,” he says.
“Well, who did you see?” she says. She tries to look at him, but her focus is pulled toward the bar.
“Who did I see? Well, I’ll tell you who I did see, but he didn’t see me. I was in a taxi. Hank Fonda.”
“Oh, Hank. I wish we could get him and Jimmy Stewart to—do you remember what friends they used to be? And still are, I guess. But Hank’s always in a play and did you read that Jimmy Stewart is supposed to be worth thirty million dollars? I can’t believe it. Thirty million?”
“I saw that,” he says. “Gin, or vodka?”
“Oh—vodka,” she says, and from that he knows that she has had a straight vodka while waiting for him to come home. She has a theory that the alcohol in vodka is odorless, therefore less detectable than gin.
“Well, Jimmy Stewart always knew what he was doing,” he says, and mercifully gets to work on her cocktail.
“But think of anybody in our business with thirty million. Bing Crosby—but he’s different. Oil, I guess.”
“That’s what it was. Oil. At least with Jimmy. With Bing it was oil, and orange juice, and God knows what all.”
“Ronald Colman and Warner Baxter. They never made anything like that. Dick Barthelmess. Bill Powell. They were supposed to be the richest in the old days.”
“Don’t overlook Lew Cody in that setup,” he says. “Hang a lip over that and see how it tastes.”
“Don’t say that, Jack. You know I don’t like it. It’s so vulgar.”
“Well, I’m a vulgar man.”
“No you’re not, not any more,” she says. She has the drink in her hand, and it will protect her from anything.
“You haven’t tasted that,” he says.
“I’m not in any hurry,” she says. Nor is she, now that the glass is in her hand, less than a foot away from her lips. “You? Aren’t you having anything?”
“No.”
“Have something. Go on. Have something,” she says.
“No thanks.”
“I think it’s awful of you to make me drink alone,” she says.
“Hell, what difference does it make?”
“Well, then I’m just going ahead without you,” she says, and finishes her drink in a sip and a gulp.
Every day they play this game. She has two more drinks, and at seven o’clock she is drunk, drunk for the night, ready for bed and four or five hours’ sleep. He gets his dinner; heats the soup and unwraps the sandwich the maid has left in the icebox. He puts the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and goes to his bedroom, where he has a TV and his personal junk and all the books he has read and plans to read.
He learned about reading from Celeste, fairly late in life and without preparation. In the early years of their marriage he would come home from the studio and say, “What do you do all day?”
“I’m not like you, I don’t have to be doing something all the time. I can play tennis, and swim, if I feel like it. But I’d just as soon read.”
“Read what?”
“Books, silly.”
“What are you trying to do? Improve your mind?”
“It’s too late for that. No, I’ve always liked to read.”
“What? Love stories?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. I don’t only read novels, you know. If there’s something I think I’m going to like, I buy it. The people at the bookstore make suggestions, Dick and Marian. They have a pretty good idea of what I’ll like.”
Once in a while she would urge him to read a novel that she thought might have picture possibilities for him, but he would persuade her to tell him the plot without his having to read it. Then came the moment of his decision to quit acting in movies. “We have enough now,” he said. “Nearly a million in tax-frees, and my studio pension. Let’s get the hell out of here and start living. Let’s go back to New York and be private people.”
“I always have been private people,” she said. “Nobody knows me if I’m not with you.”
“Well, they damn soon won’t know you when you’re with me, because I’m washed up.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s true. If I enjoyed the work I’d be glad to play grandfathers, but at my age five o’clock in the morning comes too early. What’s there in it for me? Smaller parts, lower billing, five o’clock calls and maybe a couple of hundred thousand more than we have now. No. We have enough, and my mind’s made up, Celeste.”
“You didn’t happen to wonder whether I’d want to make a whole new start? The only friends I have are out here. Who will I know back there?”
“Who do you know here? Our friends are beginning to die off, can’t get jobs.”
“I have friends that you don’t know about. Lots of them. Not even in picture business. Some I’ve never even met their husbands, but they’re friends of mine all the same.”
“Then it ought to be easy to get to know the same kind of people in New York. There we’ll be private people too.”
“You’ll never be private people—and I was never anything else,” she said.
They sold their house on Belagio Drive at double the price they had paid for it. “I didn’t even have to wait to make that extra hundred gees,” he said. She said nothing. “Listen, there’s no use of your sulking. I want to live in New York. You’re not a Californian.”
“Neither are most Californians,” she said. “But most of them when they come here, they stay.”
“That’s because they have to. I don’t have to,” he said. “I’m washed up in pictures, and if we stayed here I’d rot. I don’t even like the climate.”
“I do like the climate and I hate New York. Too hot, too cold, too everything.”
“You like the smog. You like driving on the freeways,” he said.
“Oh, let’s not talk about it any more. You want to move, so we’re moving,” she said.
He bought the apartment in the 79th Street cooperative that she chose. They shipped the things she wanted to the apartment and sold the rest to the purchaser of the Belagio Drive house. Once installed, he took her to the first-nights of plays and made an effort to provide a social life for her, but it was no go. The moment he left the apartment to have lunch with his golfing friends she would begin hitting the bottle, and servants lasted about a week.
“All right,” he said one morning. “We’ve had it.”
“We’ve had it?”
“We have had it,” he said. “I’ll cut it right down the middle. You take half, I’ll take the other half. You go back to the coast and get a divorce. I’m staying here.”
“Do you mean that?” she said.
“Of course I mean it,” he said. “If you want to, you can leave today. I’ll get you a plane reservation and you can be back in heaven tomorrow.”
“Unfortunately I’m going to have to put it off for a while. You have some news for me. I have some for you. I’m going to have an operation.”
“What kind of an operation?”
“A hysterectomy.”
“When?”
“Monday,” she said.
“When did you find out about this?”
“Yesterday.”
“Well, I guess that changes things,” he said.
“I hope so. I’m not going to be noble and all that. I need you to get me through this. When I’m all right again, I’ll go to California and get the divorce, but I need you now, Jack. I’m scared.”
“Is that why you’ve been hacking away at that bottle?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That’s not the reason I was drinking too much. Not at first. I got tight because I was miserable in New York. But then I went to see the doctor for a check-up, and he discovered something he didn’t like. Yesterday he called up and told me to get ready to go to the hospital Saturday afternoon. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. You have to see me through this.”
“Of course I will,” he said. “Is it Dr. Hawthorne?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you have to admit one thing. You wouldn’t be able to have Hawthorne if we were still living in California.”
“I’ll admit it,” she said.
He took a room near hers in the hospital, and during the two weeks she was there he got through five books. “That’s more books than I’ve read in five years,” he said.
“Or maybe ten,” she said.
“Or maybe ten. I must be getting old.”
“We’re neither of us any younger,” she said.
“No, but I was surprised that I could concentrate that much,” he said. “Ever since we’ve been in the hospital—at first I wondered what the hell I was going to do to kill time. Of course that book by James Thurber—I’d seen a lot of his drawings but I never read anything by him.”
“He was a writer before he was a cartoonist,” she said.
“I didn’t like all the stories by Hemingway, but I liked some of them. Not much plot, but the dialog—did he ever write any plays?”
“Not that I know of,” she said.
“Maugham. Of course I knew he wrote Rain.”
“He didn’t, though. He wrote a story that Rain was based on, but someone else wrote the play. I can never remember their names. Two people wrote the play.”
“That’s three books. The only one I couldn’t finish was the one by Thomas Mann. What made you think I’d like that?”
“I wasn’t sure you would, but I was trying you out. He wrote other things you might like. How did you like The Great Gatsby?”
“All right. I remember when it first came out, hearing people talk about it. Naturally I didn’t read it then, but I heard about it. It’s very dated. Prohibition and all that. And I’m positive the author was trying to be subtle, but I didn’t get the hidden meaning, whatever it was. I met F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was on the Metro lot. Thalberg got him there, but he didn’t last very long. If I’d known he was going to turn out to be so famous I’d have paid more attention to him, but all I remember was that he was a little guy with a Brooks Brothers shirt that asked me how much money I made. That’s what he was doing that night, asking everybody how much money they were making. Kind of a gag with him.”
“Yes, I guess he did that to get a rise out of people,” she said.
“You know, if you hadn’t had this operation I probably would have gone the rest of my life without reading a book. But I discovered something. I can actually sit down and if the first few pages hold my interest, I’ll finish the book in two or three sittings. It’s a handy thing to know. I may turn out to be a voracious reader, in my old age.”
“Well, it can be a great satisfaction,” she said.
The novelty of reading did not wear off, but from a novelty it changed to a fixed habit, so much so that in a few years there was always a book that he was reading. In his enthusiasm he sometimes discovered authors who were hardly obscure, and he made gaffes that exposed his unliterary past; but he was acquiring a personal taste, and above all he was busy in the mind. The good writers had uttered small and large truths and shockin
g lies that he had never heard of, but accepted and rejected in the process of forming his own taste. Zola would have been the man to write the great Hollywood novel; Faulkner should be writing a re-make of The Birth of a Nation; Rex Harrison ought to play Soames Forsyte. The pleasure of reading was conditioned by his three decades of life in the studios, but a transition was taking place and as reading for its own sake grew into a proclivity, he had only his past ignorance to remind him that he had not always been so fond of books.
He read a great deal more than any of the men he now saw, most of whom had quit reading when they were graduated from college. As a consequence and because he also played a good game of golf and could take a small boat through the treacherous waters of Plum Gut, he came to be regarded as something of a Renaissance man. The respect they showed him intensified his enjoyment of New York; no one in picture business had ever asked him to recommend a book. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Jack—how did a guy like you ever put up with those dumbheads in Hollywood?” said one of his new friends.
“Oh, they weren’t all that bad,” he said.
Such tributes to his familiarity with books came from the men he saw but not from Celeste, who had been originally responsible for his interest and was now responsible for his maintaining it. Her recovery from surgery was satisfactory to the doctors, and she appeared to have adjusted herself to living in New York. But one afternoon, a few months after her return from the hospital, he came home and she was sitting at her desk with the telephone in her hand. She had a tumbler of gin or vodka on the blotter in front of her, and she was smoking a cigarette. She did not acknowledge his entrance. “Who else is there?” she said. She nodded and smiled. “Oh, what’s she wearing? That same little white hat she always wears?” Again the nodding and smiling. “Put Betty on. I want to talk to Betty . . . Hello, you old bitch. I hear some very interesting things about you and a very high-up person in Washington, D.C.”
He went to his room and changed into lounging pajamas. A half hour later she was still talking on the telephone, but her coquettishness indicated that she was now talking to a man. “I have to hang up now,” she said.