Youngblood hawke, p.34
Youngblood Hawke, page 34
A loudspeaker grated, Telephone for Mr. Hawke. He bolted to his villa. "One moment for New York . . . Mrs. Green? Ready with Mr. Hawke. Go ahead, Mrs. Green."
"Hello?" Jeanne's voice: a little raspy as always, but full of sweet warmth.
He said, "Mrs.? Tell me it isn't true, Jeanne."
Her laugh, low and intimate: "Hardly. Same bitter old spinster at this end. How are you?"
"Why didn't you call me last night? I left word for you to call me."
"Yes, Mr. Hawke. I didn't get in till four-fifteen and I was in no shape for business conversation. You are talking to the owner of one of New York's historic hangovers. Something I can do for you?"
"What were you doing until four-fifteen?"
"Helling around."
"With whom?"
"None of your business. Karl Fry, since you ask." Jeanne did not mention that Fry had proposed marriage to her, after filling her with champagne at the Empire Room of the Waldorf and then taking her on a round of night clubs. It did not seem politic to tell this to Hawke, not now and probably never.
"Jeanne, it's all set, my move from Prince to Hodge Hathaway. Did Hodge tell you?"
She said cautiously, "I heard something. I don't know what I am and what I'm not supposed to know any more. Exactly how does it stand, can you tell me?"
He told her the status of negotiations, and made her laugh with a description of Lax's phone-juggling. She said, "Well, I think that's marvellous. I'll believe it when it's really happened on paper."
"Jeanne, I'd like to finish up this book fast so we can publish it in '48. The political novel is begging to get written. It's piling up in my head like a headache. I want you to come out here now. You know Ross Hodge will send you like a shot."
"Oh?" It was not said loud but the word carried a strong female charge. A measurable silence: then, "Are you sure you want that? Maybe you should just gallop ahead and finish. The queries might upset you and slow you up."
"I do want you. This business of working by mail is slow and unsatisfactory. You and I could clear up tons of this stuff working together in a few hours, instead of writing back and forth incessantly. And it would be more fun. Wouldn't it?"
"Well, I mean, but, you know, aren't you coming back to New York in the next few weeks anyway? From your last letter I gathered you're about ready to give up movie writing as a bad job."
"I'm staying on. I have to."
"You seem to be doing a lot of work on your novel. I received that last hundred fifty pages you sent me."
"I wrote fourteen pages last night. After a hard day at the studio."
"Isn't that illegal? Aren't they renting your brains on a twenty-four-hour basis?"
"Yes. What I've been sending you is bootleg literature."
"It's wonderful that you're making such progress."
"My monastic habits."
"Yes, yes," she said, but then the sarcasm faded to wonder, "but you can't be dissipating too much with all this copy you're turning in. How about the starlets? Aren't they beautiful?"
"Can't see them for the smog. And for thinking of you."
"All right," she said like a schoolteacher. "I can't possibly come out there. What's the weather like? Of course I'd get a chance to see my mother, which is long overdue."
The upshot of much fencing was that Jeanne admitted she could perhaps get out there in two weeks; not any sooner. Hawke bargained her down to a Monday morning ten days away, suspecting that she was being coy. But he could not move her further.
The fact was that Jeanne, as she talked, was in a grand flutter, and was swiftly revising in her head complex plans that included, beyond heavy editing chores, a visit to Karl Fry's two children in St. Louis. She had been out with Fry almost every night in recent weeks. She liked Karl, and admired him. She felt that she could strengthen him and even perhaps help him to new literary success, a revival of his once splendid reputation. She was with him in the office every day. They had become easy joking comrades. He had been lavishing the theatre, the restaurants, and all the multi-colored pleasures of New York on her. In her first wounded weeks after Hawke had gone to The Park Tower, Jeanne had leaned desperately on Karl's quiet devotion, just to get through the days and the nights and now the thing had come this far. Marriage to Karl no longer seemed totally absurd to her, as it once had. Compared to the young doctors, lawyers, government men, and business men who had taken up with her over the years, Karl Fry came off quite well. He was too old, and he was divorced. But he had a sharp intelligence, which was an absolute requirement; she could not endure the thought of marrying a man duller than herself. He was decent, and his sense of humor was superb, and he was deeply in love with her. Her misfortune was that she loved Arthur Hawke. If she could not have Hawke—and during the break over Mrs. Winter she had forced herself to believe she could not—it almost did not matter what became of her, and to look for love like that again was hopeless. All these thoughts whirled in a vortex in Jeanne's mind as Hawke sprang on her this sudden plea to join him in Hollywood. The implications were plain, and dizzying.
Here he was, the big exasperating Southern clown, still arguing in that ridiculous thick accent: "Jeanie, mah birthday is the Sunday before that. Sho'ly you can leave Saturday and celebrate mah twenty-eighth birthday with me heah?"
"No, I can't."
"You owe it to me as my editor not to let me face such a milestone in solitude. It would depress me."
"You have friends out there."
"Not one I'll spend my birthday with."
"It's out of the question. I'll be there some time on Monday the twenty-ninth of August, unless I write you otherwise. I'll bring the manuscript. I'll call you at the studio when I arrive. This is all quite exciting, and I'm not at all sure I can arrange it, but I'll try. Anything else?"
"Not that I can think of, Jeanne."
"What do you hear from Mrs. Winter?"
As any other man in the world would have done, he lied, "Not a thing."
"Lovely. Bye, Arthur."
3
Hawke was dressing for the dinner party at which he was going to meet Howard Fain, the young author who had caught the brass ring, slain the dragon, reached the Pole, with his first novel. He felt no rancor toward Fain, and was but mildly jealous of his vast success. This was due to no unusual fund of Christian virtue, but rather to a lunatic serenity that lay under all his moods, a conviction that he too was going to be rich and famous, if not now then a little later. The effect of this eccentric self-confidence was to make him oddly amiable, as writers go.
Lax telephoned while he was at the mirror, worrying over the tightness of his dark suit. "Hawke, I may be throwing you a curve here but I thought I'd better check with you. Do you know that Frieda Winter's coming to my party?"
Hawke's throat tightened, and he cleared it with an effort. "Frieda? I just got a letter from her from New York."
"Well, Feydal is having temperamental fits. Wants to cancel the tour. She came to calm him down. As a matter of fact she and Howard Fain arrived on the same plane last night. Didn't she phone you?"
"No."
"Well, I'm just telling you, she'll be here."
"I'm glad to hear it. She's a delightful woman."
"Look, Hawke, it's none of my goddamned business but Frieda is very much older than you. Not to mention that she's so much smarter than you that it's no contest."
"Ferdie, I barely know Mrs. Winter, but I've always found her conversation agreeable."
"Very good, Hawke. Just stick to that. Stick to conversation with her, in large groups of people, in brightly lit rooms. She can't stay here more than a few days, she's got a big piece of a show trying out in Hartford that's coming in right after Labor Day."
"Thanks, Ferdie."
The piece of information that bothered him most was the fact that she had arrived on the same airplane with Howard Fain. There seemed to be a peculiar, perhaps very unpleasant, significance in that. He finished dressing with much greater care.
Ferdie Lax lived in one of the best houses on one of the best streets of Beverly Hills. Hawke had often prowled those streets in wonder. There were palms all over Los Angeles, but none like the palms of Beverly Hills. Elsewhere the palms had long brown beards of old fronds hanging down sometimes twenty feet; in Beverly Hills each palm was barbered smooth up to this year's tuft of green. Elsewhere lawns were gray-brown in the drought of summer; here each house had a sweeping soft green lawn watered from buried sprinklers by clockwork. There was no style to the streets. There was a glut of style that erased style. Each block was a museum shelf of model mansions, but because real estate cost so much, the mansions stood cheek by jowl, separated only by cement tracks for automobiles. A French château which needed, to complete it, twenty acres of greensward, stood huddled between a Tudor manor that also cried for a vast park to enable it to breathe, and a Spanish ranch house without its ranch; and so on for long blocks. Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land—the one true mark of stable grandeur—was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.
A bowing butler in uniform opened Ferdie's door. The agent stood in the foyer under a Utrillo painting, laughing and joking with the new arrivals; he was holding a cigar in one hand and a huge thick tumbler of whiskey and ice in the other, and his parrot face was gleaming with elation.
"I'm late," Hawke said. It was a quarter to nine.
"Hell no, right on time."
"Frieda here?"
"Not yet. We'll be eating any minute," the agent said, leading him by an elbow into a gigantic brilliantly lit living room. Here Hawke at once recognized five great movie stars, three men and two women, scattered among nobodies, or at least people who seemed nobodies. The men were the dour Western star, the dashing costume movie star, and the charming villain star of the time. The women were the wiggling sex star and the heavy dramatic star. These types are fixed in American films like cabinet posts. The people who hold the posts come and go because of age, or illness, or bad pictures, or a shift in public fancy; but the offices remain, and are seldom long vacant. Lax introduced Hawke to these dazzling men and women; and though he had seen a couple of them before at lunch time in the studio dining room, he was thrilled as a schoolboy to shake their hands. The sex star astounded and delighted him by saying that she had read Alms for Oblivion and liked it; she was as gracious as a young queen. Then Lax presented Hawke to two tired insignificant-looking men, and they turned out to be the most famous directors of the day, and to a dozen other people of descending importance, including a once-prominent British novelist who now wrote Hollywood movies.
These people greeted Hawke with pleasant charm, but his arrival caused no change in the party noise, and everybody went on chatting as before once he had passed down the line. At the Prince party eight months ago he had been an unknown quantity, a potential new hero. Now he was just another young novelist with a poorly selling book; no cause for excitement among these luminaries! Lax took him to a bar in the next room, a library which in size, ornate wood panelling, and sweep of leather-bound volumes, put the Prince library to shame.
"Ferdie, your library is magnificent! Good God, it's the library of a nobleman!"
Lax said, "I just rent this place." He named the owner, a director of fluffy comedies. "He's over in France doing the foreign residence bit."
"What's the foreign residence bit?"
"Something we'll get you on as soon as possible. You don't pay income taxes."
"That's impossible."
"The hell it is. It's the greatest thing since the Emancipation Proclamation. Get a drink."
Hawke sidled into the living room, stood near the library door against the wall, and drank and listened and looked. The room was furnished with heavy dark pieces, Italian or Spanish, he thought. The main colors of drapery and upholstery were plum and gray. Grotesque modern paintings in bold colors flared on the walls. A black concert grand piano was quite inconspicuous in a corner. The immense fireplace of old rough stone looked as though it had been brought stone by stone from Europe, and it was flanked by a colossal hammered copper woodbox of Mexican design.
It had become quiet in the room because the dashing costume star was telling a joke, and he had almost everybody's attention. The joke was long and ribaldly funny. Hawke had never heard it before. What amazed him, accustomed though he was by now to the way Hollywood people talked, was the famous actor's calm, totally unself-conscious use of the foulest obscenities in the presence of the women, and their smiling acceptance of this. In none of the company through which Hawke had drifted—and he had been in fairly salty company sometimes, in his drunken bouts at college, and on shore leave in the Seabees; he had been in whorehouses and at parties of Greenwich Village perverts, and here in Hollywood he had stumbled into several appalling brawls in his rounding with Goodhand—but in none of these places had he encountered anything like this whole indifference of polished and elegant women to supposedly dirty language. A drunken prostitute on the street, Hawke thought, would look arch and at least pretend offense if you spoke to her as the actor was speaking to these grand ladies, two of them internationally worshipped, all of them magnificently and most tastefully dressed, all of them displaying in every gesture the graces of culture and of prestige. An explosion of delighted laughter greeted the end of the story, which turned on sodomy between a woman and a dog. As the laughter started to fade the heavy dramatic woman star struck in with skill, and began another story, equally obscene.
Hawke was still enough of a Hovey boy to be, not offended, but stupefied. The fault could not be in these people, he thought, so self-confident and so eminent. There was a liberating idea, a piece of cultural knowledge, that they had and he lacked. Into his mental inventory went the note that ordinary standards of talk did not exist for the people of the films; that women, so far as manners went, had no sex.
And as the joke session went on, and he stared at the laughing relaxed film stars, he began almost to feel that he was in a nightmare, in which he had wandered into a waxworks museum where dummies of the stars had come to life and were blabbering at each other in dream language. The scene had the dislocated overreality of a dream, due in part, no doubt, to the stiff drinks he was swallowing one after another in anticipation of encountering Frieda, and to the excitement of being in a room with five world-famous people. His stomach hurt from hunger; it was past ten o'clock; but there was no sign of dinner, and no sign among the other guests that they missed it. They went on and on drinking and swapping jokes, and then all at once, far down the immense room just inside the open arch to the foyer, there she was.
Frieda Winter, in a high-fashion swathe of black that billowed around her hips and tightened to her knees, and a little scarf of black on her brown hair, peering around the room with her head down, and then half-turning her elastic body to say something to the small man who had come in with her, throwing her head a little to one side to laugh—it was she, she and nobody else in the world. She walked down the room, her hand resting on the arm of the man. Most of the people in the room she greeted familiarly, and then introduced her escort. As the guests became aware of the new arrivals the quality of the room noise changed. Random chatter and laughter subsided into the buzz and murmur of a business office. Eyes that had been looking here and there now looked one way. For the young man with Frieda, as Hawke perceived immediately, was Howard Fain. The triumphant author wore a rough blue-and-white checked shirt, a brown corduroy jacket, and unpressed gray trousers; a "novelist's rig" with a vengeance! And a perfect costume for this room full of wealthy, perfectly groomed people; nothing could have answered better. Frieda saw Hawke, and she nodded and smiled from a distance, much as she had been doing to everyone else. He stood where he was, with his back to the wall at the library door. After a while she came, leading the author.
"Well, the only two really important people in the room certainly ought to meet," she said.
Fain's hand was small, rough, and powerful. Though he was so short that he hardly came up to Hawke's shoulders, he did not look like a little man. He had the handsomeness people speak of as Byronic: strong male features, with a softening trace of sensitivity at the mouth; brilliant blue eyes in a pale face, curly heavy black hair worn long, and shaped with care that contradicted his rough clothes. Hawke thought instantly that Fain was carrying off the "novelist's rig" with an effort, and that Fain, like himself, was overanxious about his appearance.
Hawke said, "Hello. Your novel's a wonderful work. I'm sore as hell at you for blotting me out."
Fain said with a mechanical smile, "Thanks. I'm sorry I haven't read yours. After what Frieda tells me, it's the next book I will read."
"How's Paul, Frieda?" Hawke said. Her perfume was troubling him; it flooded his mind with pictures of their secret love-making. But she was again the New York woman he had first seen: cool, poised, remote as a star, barely smiling.
"Which one, Arthur?"
"Both."
"Both fine. Paul junior's back at school after prolonging his malingering as long as he could." She put her chin almost down to her chest, and squinted at him from under her brows. "Haven't you put on weight?"
"I'm afraid so."
"I have to talk to Ferdie." She slipped away, leaving the two authors in a stance like boxers or roosters sizing each other up for a fight. A waiter passed with drinks. Fain took two large brimming martinis and set one on the piano. "I'm a little behind here." He drank off most of the drink in his hand, and stared around at the people in the room with a bitter, disappointed look. "God, this is a sick town."
