tha had worked up inside to a pitch about her career-not a very high pitch because of seven years of neglect but a sort of nervous acquiescence and I was going to speak strongly to Father. They never did anything for people like Martha who had made them so much money at one time. They let them slip away into misery eked out with extra work-it would have been kinder to ship them out of town. And Father was being so proud of me this summer. I had to keep him from telling everybody) just how I was brought up to produce such a perfect jewel. And Bennington-oh what an exclusive-dear God my heart. I assured him there was the usual proportion of natural born skivies and biddies tastefully concealed by throw overs from Sex, Fifth Avenue; but Father had worked himself up to practically an alumnus. "You've had everything," he used to say happily. Everything included roughly the two years in Florence where I managed against heavy odds to be the only virgin in school, and the courtesy debut in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a veritable flower of the fine old cost-and-gross aristocracy. So I knew he would do something for Martha Dodd and as we went into his office I had great dreams of doing something for Johnny Swanson the cowboy too and Evelyn Brent and all sorts of discarded flowers. Father was a charming and sympathetic man-except for that time I had seen him unexpectedly in New York-and there was something touching about his being my father. After all he was my father-he would do anything in the world for me. Only Rosemary Schmiel was in the outer office and she was on Birdy Peters' phone. She waved for me to sit down but I was full of my plans and telling Martha to take it easy I pressed the clicker under Rosemary's desk and went toward the opened door. "Your father's in conference," Rosemary called. "Not in conference but I ought to-" By this time I was through the door and a little vestibule and another door and caught Father in his shirt sleeves, very sweaty and trying to open a window. It was a hot day but I hadn't realized it was that hot and thought he was ill. "No, I'm all right," he said. "What is it?" I told him. I told him the whole theory of people like Martha Dodd, walking up and down his office. How he could use them and guarantee them regular employment. He seemed to take me up excitedly and kept nodding and agreeing, and I felt closer to him than I had for a long time. I came close and kissed him on his cheek. He was trembling and his shirt was soaked through. "You're not well," I said. "Or you're in some sort of stew." "No, I'm not at all." "What is it?" "Oh it's Monroe," he said. "That God damn little Vine Street Jesus! He's in my hair night and day!" "What's happened?" I asked, very much cooler. "Oh, he sits like a little God damn priest or rabbi and says what he'll do and he won't do. I can't tell you now-I'm half crazy. Why don't you go along." "I won't have you like this." "Go along I tell you!" I sniffed but he never drank. "Go and brush your hair," I said. "I want you to see Martha Dodd." "In here! I'd never get rid of her." "Out there then. Go wash up first. Put on another shirt." With an exaggerated gesture of despair he went into the little bathroom adjoining. It was hot in the office as if it had been closed for hours and maybe that was making him sick so I opened two more windows. "You go along," Father called from behind the closed door of the bathroom. "I'll be there presently." "Be awfully nice to her," I said. "No charity." As if it were Martha speaking for herself a long low moan came from somewhere in the room. I was startled-then transfixed as it came again not from the bathroom where Father was, not from outside but from a closet in the wall across from me. How I was brave enough I don't know but I ran across to it and opened it and Father's secretary Birdy Peters tumbled out stark naked-just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of stifling, stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor with the one hand still clutching some clothes and lay on the floor bathed in sweat-just as Father came in from the bathroom. I could feel him standing behind me and without turning I knew exactly how he looked, for I had surprised him before. "Cover her up," I said, covering her up myself with a rug from the couch. "Cover her up!" I left the office. Rosemary Schmiel saw my face as I came out and responded with a terrified expression. I never saw her again or Birdy Peters either. As Martha and I went out Martha asked "What's the matter dear?"-and when I didn't say anything, "You did your best. Probably it was the wrong time. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take you to see a very nice English girl. Did you see the girl that Stahr danced with at our table the other night?" So at the price of a little immersion in the family drains I had what I wanted. I don't remember much about our call. She wasn't at home was one reason. The screen door of her house was unlocked and Martha went in calling "Kathleen" with bright familiarity. The room we saw was bare and formal as a hotel; there were flowers about but they did not look like sent flowers. Also Martha found a note on the table which said, "Leave the dress. Have gone looking for a job. Will drop by tomorrow." Martha read it twice but it didn't seem to be for Stahr, and we waited five minutes. People's houses are very still when they are gone. Not that I expect them to be jumping around but I leave the observation for what it's worth. Very still. Prim almost with just a fly holding down the place and paying no attention to you, and the corner of a curtain blowing. "I wonder what kind of a job," said Martha. "Last Sunday she went somewhere with Stahr. " But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here- producer's blood, I thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the placid sunshine. It was no use-I felt just black and awful. I had always been proud of my body-I had a way of thinking of it as geometric which made everything it did seem all right and there was probably not any kind of place, including churches and offices and shrines, where people had not embraced-but no one had ever stuffed me naked into a hole in the wall in the middle of a business day. Episode 16, First Part "If you were in a drug store," said Stahr "-having a prescription filled-" "You mean a chemist?" Boxley asked. "If you were in a chemist's," conceded Stahr, "and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick-" "-Very ill?" queried Boxley. "Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures." "A murder outside the window, you mean." "There you go," said Stahr smiling. "It might be a spider working on the pane." "Of course-I see." "I'm afraid you don't, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us." "I might as well leave," said Boxley. "I'm no good to you. I've been here three weeks and I've accomplished nothing. I make suggestions but no one writes them down." "I want you to stay. Something in you doesn't like pictures, doesn't like telling a story this way-" "It's such a damned bother," exploded Boxley. "You can't let yourself go-" He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow-that they were talking in the always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an open sea. Or else-it seemed at times-they were in a huge quarry where even the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half obliterated inscriptions of the past. "I keep wishing you could start over," Boxley said. "It's this mass production." "That's the condition," said Stahr. "There's always some lousy condition. We're making a life of Rubens-suppose I asked you to do portraits of rich dopes like Pat Brady and me and Gary Cooper and Marcus when you wanted to paint Jesus Christ! Wouldn't you feel you had a condition? Our condition is that we have to take people's own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won't you give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?" Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a point where the content of the "A productions" was wider and richer than that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only as Mr. Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman. "Come down to La Borwits' office with me," said Stahr. "They sure need some sugar there." In La Borwits' office two writers, a shorthand secretary and a supervisor sat in a tense smokey stalemate where Stahr had left them three hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La Borwits spoke with awed reverence for his defeat. "We've just got too many characters, Monroe." Stahr snorted affably. "That's the principal idea of the picture." He took some change out of his pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar which clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a quarter. La Borwits watched miserably; he knew this was a favorite idea of Stahr's and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone's back was toward him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to leave his wrists-and then he caught them neatly as they were descending. After that he felt better. He was in control. One of the writers had taken out some coins also and presently rules were defined. "You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty." They played for half an hour-all except Boxley who sat aside and dug into the script, and the secretary who kept tally. She calculated the cost of the four men's time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At the end La Borwits was winner by $5.50 and a janitor brought in a step-ladder to take the money out of the light. Boxley spoke up suddenly. "You have the stuffings of a tuhkey here," he said. "What!" "It's not pictures." They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile. "So we've got a real picture man here!" exclaimed La Borwits. "A lot of beautiful speeches," said Boxley boldly. "But no situations. After all, you know, it's not going to be a novel: and it's too long. I can't exactly describe how I feel but it's not quite right. And it leaves me cold." He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr turned away, watching the others out of he corner of his eye. "We don't need less characters," said Boxley. "We need more. As I see it that's the idea." "That's the idea," said the writers. "Yes-that's the idea," said La Borwits. Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created. "Let each character see himself in the other's place," he said. "The policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually has his face. I mean show it that way. You could almost call the thing 'Put Yourself in My Place.' " Suddenly they were at work again-taking up this new theme in turn like hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out again tomorrow but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere-never consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like and sometimes even looking like a small boy getting up a show. He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing-a deliberate accolade-he didn't want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an hour. Episode 16 (Part 2) Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a colored man with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie detector. He stripped to the waist and the weekly examination began. "How've you been feeling?" "Oh-the usual," said Stahr. "Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?" "No-about five hours. If I go to bed early I just lie there." "Take the sleeping pills." "The yellow one gives me a hangover." "Take two red ones then." "That's a nightmare." "Take one of each-the yellow first." "All right-I'll try. How've you been?" "Say-I take care of myself, Monroe. I save myself." "The hell you do-you're up all night sometimes." "Then I sleep all next day." After ten minutes Baer said: "Seems O.K. The blood pressure's up five points." "Good," said Stahr. "That's good isn't it?" "That's good. I'll develop the cardiograms tonight. When are you coming away with me?" "Oh, some time," said Stahr lightly. "In about six weeks things'll ease up." Baer looked at him with a genuine looking that had grown over three years. "You got better in thirty-three when you laid up," he said. "Even for three weeks." "I will again." No he wouldn't, Baer thought. With Minna's help he had enforced a few short rests years ago and lately he had hinted around trying to find who Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him away. It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now. Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms? You couldn't persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said differently but what it added up to was the definite urge toward total exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he had seen before but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He had cured a man or so-a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell. "You hold your own," he said. They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know when-he did not know how soon now. "If I hold my own I can't ask more," said Stahr. The colored man had finished packing the apparatus. "Next week same time?" "O. K., Bill," said Stahr. "Good bye." As the door closed Stahr switched open the Dictograph. Miss Doolan's voice came through immediately. "Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?" "What do you mean?" he asked startled. "A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call." "Well, my God!" he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It had been five days-this would never do at all. "She's on now?" "Yes." "Well, all right then." In a moment he heard the voice up close to him. "Are you married?" he asked, low and surly. "No, not yet." His memory blocked out her face and form-as he sat down she seemed to lean down to his desk keeping level with his eyes. "What's on your mind?" he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to talk that way. "You did find the letter?" she asked. "Yes. It turned up that night." ill "That's what I want to speak to you about." He found an attitude at length-he was outraged. "What is there to talk about?" he demanded. "I tried to write you another letter but it wouldn't write." "I know that too." There was a pause. "Oh cheer up!" she said surprisingly. "This doesn't sound like you. It is Stahr, isn't it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?" "I feel a little outraged," he said almost pompously. "I don't see the use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you." "I don't believe it's you," she said. "Next thing you'll wish me luck." Suddenly she laughed. "Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it gets when you plan to say anything-" "I never expected to hear from you again," he said with dignity; but it was no use, she laughed again-a woman's laugh that is like a child's, just one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight. "Do you know how you make me feel?" she demanded. "Like one day in London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my mouth." "I'm sorry." "Oh please wake up," she begged. "I want to see you. I can't explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand." "I'm very busy. There's a sneak preview in Glendale tonight." "Is that an invitation?" "George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me." He surprised himself. "Do you want to come along?" "How could we talk?" She considered. "Why don't you call for me afterwards," she suggested. "We could ride around." Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting director-the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and called "wait" impatiently into the machine. "About eleven?" Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of "Riding around" seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day, at least, was complete. It had an evening-a beginning, a middle and an end. He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn mower-a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a midsummer restlessness abroad-early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously to live in the present-or, if there was no present, to invent one. She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a brave gay, stimulating reckless air of "Tighten up your belt, baby. Let's get going-to any pole." Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur, and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight. She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. "This Man" was the one she had loved and lived with. "This American" was the one who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand. "Who is he-the American?" Oh, names-what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich. He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce-not just on account of her-but that was the delay. "But the first man?" asked Stahr. "How did you get into that?" Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into the streets. London can be harsh-oh quite. Was there nobody? There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife. "Couldn't you work?" Stahr asked. "I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car." "But couldn't you get a regular job?" "It's hard-it's different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel." "But you were presented at Court?" "That was my stepmother who did that-on an off chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called 'Last Blessing.' Did you ever read it?" "I don't read." "I wish you'd buy it for the movies. It's a good little book. I still get a royalty from it-ten shillings a year." Then she met "The Man" and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away. "You should have run away before." "Well, you see it was difficult." She hesitated, and plunged. "You see I ran away from a king." His moralities somehow collapsed-she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head-one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased. "It wasn't the King of England," she said. "My king was out of job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London." She laughed-then added almost defiantly, "He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell." "What was he king of?" She told him-and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels. "He was a very learned man," she said. "He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn't much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were." This time Stahr laughed. "They were the standard article," he said. "You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times." They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in to his arms saying, "Oh you're so nice. I do like to be with you." But her mind was divided-this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American. "How long have you known The American?" he asked. "Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each other. He used to say 'It looks like a cinch from now on.'" "Then why did you call me up?" She hesitated. "I wanted to see you once more. Then too-he was supposed to arrive today but last night he wired that he'd be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend-after all you are my friend." He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: she wants to see if I'm in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she'd consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won't consider it till I've committed myself. "Are you in love with The American?" he asked. "Oh yes. It's absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He's moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that." "But are you in love with him?" "Oh yes, I'm in love with him." The "Oh yes" told him she was not-told him to speak for himself-that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm. "Not tonight," she whispered. "All right." They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire. "I know what it is," she said, "but how stupid. English people don't kill themselves when they don't get what they want." They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll. They looked at each other and her eyes asked "Shall I marry The American?" He did not answer. After a while he said: "Let's go somewhere for the week-end." She considered. "Are you talking about tomorrow?" "I'm afraid I am." "Well, I'll tell you tomorrow," she said. "Tell me tonight. I'd be afraid-" "-find a note in the car?" she laughed. "No there's no note in the car. You know almost everything now." "Almost everything." "Yes-almost. A few little things." He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He doubted-or he wanted to doubt-if there had been a maze of philandering-a fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of a highly anomalous position-one foot in the Palace and one in the background. "You had to laugh a lot," she said. "I learned to laugh a lot." "He could have married you-like Mrs. Simpson," Stahr said in protest. "Oh, he was married. And he wasn't a romantic." She stopped herself. "Am I?" "Yes," she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. "Part of you is. You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans." "Don't start trusting Americans too implicitly," he said, smiling. "They may be out in the open but they change very fast." She looked concerned. "Do they?" "Very fast and all at once," he said. "And nothing ever changes them back." "You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans." She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand. "Where will we go tomorrow?" he said. "Maybe up in the mountains. I've got everything to do tomorrow but I won't do any of it. We can start at four and get there by afternoon." "I'm not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn't seem to be quite the girl who came out to California for a new life." He could have said it then, said "It is a new life" for he knew it was, he knew he could not let her go now, but something else said to sleep on it as an adult, no romantic. And tell her tomorrow. Still she was looking at him her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and then up and down once more with that odd slowly waving motion of her head. ... It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now-tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it but far away over the night The American has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here. ... The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen's house. It seemed warm even in darkness-wherever he had been near her was by way of being enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine-the rising house at the beach, the very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that struck his soul alert with delight. As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house now-and say "This is forever." Kathleen waited, irresolute herself-pink and silver frost waiting to melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there was a fierce self-respect that would only let her go so far. She had no illusions about the considerations that swayed princes. "We'll go to the mountains tomorrow," said Stahr. Many thousands of people depended on his balanced judgement-you can suddenly blunt a quality you have lived by for twenty years. He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o'clock when he came from luncheon there was a stack of telegrams-a company ship was lost in the Arctic, a star was in disgrace, a writer was sueing for one million dollars, Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared up at him: I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE, and on a sticker attached Send your answer by Western Union Telegram. Episode 17 I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise and when I came back didn't go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August-if Stahr hadn't called me up one day at home. "I want you to arrange something, Cecelia-I want to meet a Communist Party member." "Which one?" I asked, somewhat startled. "Any one." "Haven't you got plenty out there?" "I mean one of their organizers-from New York." The summer before I had been all politics-I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from "The New Masses" around somewhere. "Will you promise him immunity?" I asked, joking. "Oh yes," Stahr answered seriously. "I won't hurt him. Get one that can talk-tell him to bring one of his books along." He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the "I AM" cult. "Do you want a blonde, or a brunette?" "Oh, get a man," he said hastily. Hearing Stahr's voice cheered me up-since I barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it-changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air. He was like a brazier out of doors on a cool night. "I don't think your father ought to know," he said. "Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?" "Oh, they don't dress up any more," I said. It was harder to arrange than I thought-Stahr's negotiations with the Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr's "proposition" was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off "Doctor Caligari" and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou," possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian Films back in the twenties and on Wylie White's suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page "treatment" of the "Communist Manifesto." But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books-and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt away-he cherished the parvenu's passionate loyalty to an imaginary past. The meeting took place in what I called the "processed leather room"-it was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane's years ago, and the term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator's room-an angora wool carpet the color of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable-you hardly dared walk on it; and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze. It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlor that used to be closed except on Sunday. But it was exactly the room for the occasion and I hoped that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part of our house. Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled -except for his voice which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a brave personal quality in the way he would meet you-he would walk right up to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all over as if he couldn't help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took him into the processed leather room. "When do you go back to college?" he asked. We had been over this fascinating ground before. "Would you like me if I were a little shorter?" I asked. "I could wear low heels and plaster down my hair." "Let's have dinner tonight," he suggested. "People will think I'm your father but I don't mind." "I love old men," I assured him. "Unless the man has a crutch I feel it's just a boy and girl affair." "Have you had many of those?" "Enough." "People fall in and out of love all the time, don't they." "Every three years so Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper." "I wonder how they manage it," he said. "I know it's true because I see them. But they look so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don't look convinced. But they get convinced all over." "You've been making too many movies." "I wonder if they're as convinced the second time or the third time or the fourth time," he persisted. "More each time," I said. "Most of all the last time." He thought this over and seemed to agree. "I suppose so. Most of all the last time." I didn't like the way he said this and I suddenly saw that under the surface he was miserable. "It's a great nuisance," he said. "It'll be better when it's over." "Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands." Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced and going to meet him I slid over to the door on one of those gossamer throw-rugs and practically into his arms. He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer-a little on the order of Spencer Tracy but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions written up in it. I couldn't help thinking as he and Stahr smiled and shook hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately-both as polite to me as you please but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when they turned in my direction. "What are you people trying to do?" demanded Stahr. "You've got my young men all upset." "That keeps them awake, doesn't it?" said Brimmer. "First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant," said Stahr. "As a model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that makes it a model plant." "The unity?" Brimmer repeated. "Do you mean what's known as the company spirit?" "Oh, not that," said Stahr, impatiently. "It seems to be me you're after. Last week a writer came into my office-a drunk-a man who's been floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse-and began telling me my business." Brimmer smiled. "You don't look to me like a man who could be told his business, Mr. Stahr." They would both have tea. When I came back Stahr was telling a story about the Warner brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him. "I'll tell you another one," Stahr said. "Balanchine the Russian dancer had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers. He didn't know which ones he was training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying 'I cannot train those Warner Brothers to dance.' " It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers didn't back the Anti-Nazi League. "Because of you people," said Stahr. "It's your way of getting at the writers. In the long view you're wasting your time. Writers are children-even in normal times they can't keep their minds on their work." "They're the farmers in this business," said Brimmer pleasantly. "They grow the grain but they're not in at the feast. Their feeling toward the producer is like the farmers' resentment of the city fellow." I was wondering about Stahr's girl-whether it was all over between them. Later when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain in a wretched road called Goldwyn Terrace, I figured out that this must have been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn't help the telegram. The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in the morning and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned in how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say "Listen I forgot to tell you but I met a man." But this track had been laid down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief that when it came along suddenly cutting across the other she found herself on it like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn't read upside down.... When my mind came back into the room they had destroyed the poor writers-Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were "unstable." "They are not equipped for authority," said Stahr. "There is no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all." "I've had that experience." "You have to say 'It's got to be like this-no other way'-even if you're not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is no real reason for anything. You pretend there is." "All leaders have felt that," said Brimmer. "Labor leaders, and certainly military leaders." "So I've had to take an attitude in this Guild matter. It looks to me like a try for power and all I am going to give the writers is money." "You give some of them very little money. Thirty dollars a week." "Who gets that?" asked Stahr surprised. "The ones who are commodities and easy to replace." "Not on my lot," said Stahr. "Oh yes," said Brimmer. "Two men in your shorts department get thirty dollars a week." "Who?" "Man named Ransome-man named O'Brien." Stahr and I smiled together. "Those are not writers," said Stahr. "Those are cousins of Cecelia's father." "There are some in other studios," said Brimmer. Stahr took his teaspoon and poured himself some medicine from a little bottle. "What's a fink?" he asked suddenly. "A fink? That's a strike breaker or a Company Tec." "I thought so," said Stahr. "I've got a fifteen hundred dollar writer that every time he walks through the commissary keeps saying 'Fink!' behind other writers' chairs. If he didn't scare hell out of them it'd be funny." Brimmer laughed. "I'd like to see that," he said. "You wouldn't like to spend a day with me over there?" suggested Stahr. Brimmer laughed with genuine amusement. "No, Mr. Stahr. But I don't doubt but that I'd be impressed. I've heard you're one of the hardest working and most efficient men in the entire West. It'd be a privilege to watch you but I'm afraid I'll have to deny myself." Stahr looked at me. "I like your friend," he said. "He's crazy but I like him." He looked closely at Brimmer. "Born on this side?" "Oh yes. Several generations." "Many of them like you?" "My father was a Baptist minister." "I mean are many of the Reds. I'd like to meet this big Jew that tried to blow over the Ford factory. What's his name-" "Frankensteen? " "That's the man. I guess some of you believe in it." "Quite a few," said Brimmer dryly. "Not you," said Stahr. A shade of annoyance floated across Brimmer's face. "Oh yes," he said. "Oh no," said Stahr. "Maybe you did once." Brimmer shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps the boot's on the other foot," he said. "At the bottom of your heart, Mr. Stahr, you know I'm right." "No," said Stahr, "I think it's a bunch of tripe." "-you think to yourself 'He's right' but you think the system will last out your time." "You don't really think you're going to overthrow the government." "No, Mr. Stahr. But we think perhaps you are." They were nicking at each other-little pricking strokes like men do sometimes. Women do it too but it is a joined battle then with no quarter, but it is not pleasant to watch men do it because you never know what's next. Certainly it wasn't improving the tonal associations of the room for me and I moved them out the French window into our golden-yellow California garden. It was midsummer but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the lawn glitter like spring. I could see Brimmer look at it with a sigh in his glance-a way they have. He opened up big outside-inches taller than I thought and broad-shouldered. He reminded me a little of Superman when he takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who don't really care about women as such. We played a round robin game of ping-pong and he handled his bat well. I heard Father come into the house singing that damn "Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day" and then breaking off as if he remembered we weren't speaking any more. It was half past six-my car was standing in the drive and I suggested we go down to the Trocadero for dinner. Brimmer had that look that Father O'Ney had that time in New York when he turned his collar around and went with Father and me to the Russian Ballet. He hadn't quite ought to be here. When Bernie the photographer, who was waiting there for some big game or other, came up to our table he looked trapped-Stahr made Bernie go away, and I would like to have had the picture. Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails one after the other. "Now I know you've been disappointed in love," I said. "What makes you think that, Cecelia?" "Cocktails." "Oh, I never drink, Cecelia. I get dyspepsia-I never have been tight." I counted them. "-two-three." "I didn't realize. I couldn't taste them. I thought there was something the matter." A silly glassy look darted into his eye-then passed away. "This is my first drink in a week," said Brimmer. "I did my drinking in the navy." The look was back in Stahr's eye-he winked it fatuously at me and said: "This soapbox son-of-a-bitch has been working on the navy." Brimmer didn't know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to include it with the evening for he smiled faintly and I saw Stahr was smiling too. I was relieved when I saw it was safely in the great American tradition and I tried to take hold of the conversation but Stahr seemed suddenly all right. "Here's my typical experience," he said very succinctly and clearly to Brimmer. "The best director in Hollywood-a man I never interfere with-has some streak in him that wants to slip a pansy into every picture or something on that order. Something offensive. He stamps it in deep like a watermark so I can't get it out. Every time he does it the Legion of Decency moves a step forward and something has to be sacrificed out of some honest film." "Typical organization trouble," agreed Brimmer. "Typical," said Stahr. "It's an endless battle. So now this director tells me it's all right because he's got a Directors Guild and I can't oppress the poor. That's how you add to my troubles." "It's a little remote from us," said Brimmer smiling. "I don't think we'd make much headway with the directors." "The directors used to be my pals," said Stahr proudly. It was like Edward the VII's boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe. "But some of them have never forgiven me," he continued, "-for bringing out stage directors when sound came in. It put them on their toes and made them learn their jobs all over but they never did really forgive me. That time we imported a whole new hogshead full of writers and I thought they were great fellows till they all went Red." Gary Cooper came in and sat down in a corner with a bunch of men who breathed whenever he did and looked as if they lived off him and weren't budging an inch. A woman across the room looked around and turned out to be Carole Lombard-I was glad that Brimmer was at least getting an eyeful. Stahr ordered a whiskey and soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-so's and none of it mattered to him because he had lots of money-it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company-maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him and what he said didn't change that but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted him to see Stahr as a sort of technological virtuoso and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen. "I'm a production man," he said as if to modify his previous attitude. "I like writers-I think I understand them. I don't want to kick anybody out if they do their work." "We don't want you to," said Brimmer pleasantly. "We'd like to take you over as a going concern." Stahr nodded grimly. "I'd like to put you in a roomful of my partners. They've all got a dozen reasons for having Fitts run you fellows out of town." "We appreciate your protection," said Brimmer with a certain irony. "Frankly we do find you difficult, Mr. Stahr-precisely because you are a paternalistic employer and your influence is very great." Stahr was only half listening. "I never thought," he said, "-that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me- because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans-I've heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don't say it's right. But it's the way I've always felt-since I was a boy." This interested Brimmer-the first thing that had interested him for an hour. "You know yourself very well, Mr. Stahr," he said. I think he wanted to get away. He had been curious to see what kind of man Stahr was and now he thought he knew. Still hoping things would be different I rashly urged him to ride home with us but when Stahr stopped by the bar for another drink I knew I'd made a mistake. It was a gentle, harmless, motionless evening with a lot of Saturday cars. Stahr's hand lay along the back of the seat touching my hair. Suddenly I wished it had been about ten years ago. I would have been nine. Brimmer about eighteen and working his way through some mid-western college and Stahr twenty-five just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with exhaustion and drink. We turned in at our drive and I drove around to the garden again. "I must go along now," said Brimmer. "I've got to meet some people." "No, stay," said Stahr. "I never have said what I wanted. We'll play ping-pong and have another drink and then we'll tear into each other." Brimmer hesitated. Stahr turned on the floodlight and picked up his ping-pong bat and I went into the house for some whiskey-I wouldn't have dared disobey him. When I came back they were not playing but Stahr was batting a whole box of new balls across to Brimmer who turned them aside. When I arrived he quit and took the bottle and retired to a chair just out of the floodlight, watching in dark dangerous majesty. He was paie-he was so transparent that you could almost watch the alcohol mingle with the poison of his exhaustion. "Time to relax on Saturday night," he said. "You're not relaxing," I said. He was carrying on a losing battle with his instinct toward schizophrenia. "I'm going to beat up Brimmer," he announced after a moment. "I'm going to handle this thing personally." "Can't you pay somebody to do it?" asked Brimmer. I signalled him to keep quiet. "I do my own dirty work," said Stahr. "I'm going to beat hell out of you and put you on a train." He got up and came forward and I put my arms around him, gripping him. "Please stop this!" I said. "Oh, you're being so bad." "This fellow has an influence over you," he said darkly. "Over all you young people. You don't know what you're doing." "Please go home," I said to Brimmer. Stahr's suit was made of slippery cloth and suddenly he slipped away from me and went for Brimmer. Brimmer retreated backward around the table. There was an odd expression in his face and afterwards I thought it looked as if he were saying, "Is this all? This frail half sick person holding up the whole thing." Then Stahr came close, his hands going up. It seemed to me that Brimmer held him off with his left arm a minute and then I looked away-I couldn't bear to watch. When I looked back Stahr was out of sight below the level of the table and Brimmer was looking down at him. "Please go home," I said to Brimmer. "All right." He stood looking down at Stahr as I came around the table. "I always wanted to hit ten million dollars but I didn't know it would be like this." Stahr lay motionless. "Please go," I said. "I'm sorry. Can I help-" "No. Please go. I understand." He looked again, a little awed at the depths of Stahr's repose which he had created in a split second. Then he went quickly away over the grass and I knelt down and shook Stahr. In a moment he came awake with a terrific convulsion and bounced up on his feet. "Where is he?" he shouted. "Who?" I asked innocently. "That American. Why in hell did you have to marry him, you damn fool." "Monroe-he's gone. I didn't marry anybody." I pushed him down in a chair. "He's been gone half an hour," I lied. The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars. I turned on a sprinkler and came back with a wet handkerchief but there was no mark on Stahr-he must have been hit in the side of the head. He went off behind some trees and was sick and I heard him kicking up some earth over it. After that he seemed all right but he wouldn't go into the house till I got him some mouthwash so I took back the whiskey bottle and got a mouthwash bottle. His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I've been out with college freshmen but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him but that was all. We went in the house; the cook said Father and Mr. Marcus and Flieshacker were on the verandah so we stayed in the "processed leather room." We both sat down in a couple of places and seemed to slide off and finally I sat on a fur rug and Stahr on a footstool beside me. "Did I hit him?" he asked. "Oh, yes," I said. "Quite badly." "I don't believe it." After a minute he added, "I didn't want to hurt him. I just wanted to chase him out. I guess he got scared and hit me." If this was his interpretation of what had happened it was all right with me. "Do you hold it against him?" "Oh no," he said. "I was drunk." He looked around. "I've never been in here before-who did this room-somebody from the studio?" "Somebody from New York." "Well, I'll have to get you out of here," he said in his old pleasant way. "How would you like to go out to Doug Fairbanks' ranch and spend the night? He asked me-I know he'd love to have you." That's how the two weeks started that he and I went around together. It only took one of them for Louella to have us married.