Youngblood hawke, p.66
Youngblood Hawke, page 66
Weltmann said, "I never expected to be married. When I found myself getting married I made a rule. I would help my new relations with money to my utmost power if ever they needed it, but I would never take any direct part in their financial affairs. I think this makes for peace at home."
The lawyer said, "It's one of the wisest rules I ever heard."
"Yes, but it leaves me out in the cold," said Mrs. Hawke. "I don't need money, I need a man to fight for my rights. I still need one. And with Art gallivanting around Europe—"
Nancy said, as the limousine started across Broadway, "Here we go. We're almost there. For God's sake, mama, no lawsuit talk tonight, of all nights. I expect it to be the biggest night of my life and I don't want it spoiled."
Weltmann said, "Just remember, Nancy, the show may fail. Arthur's reputation does not hang on this show."
The mother said to Adam, "Can it really fail? With all the whoop-de-do over Art, and this Irene Perry?"
Adam said, "The critics can stop it in its tracks."
Mrs. Hawke said, "Why can't people make up their own minds about a play? Who are these critics, anyway? They sure can't hurt a book. Why, the things they been saying about Will Horne are just terrible, yet it's selling like a house afire."
Weltmann said, "Critics can't destroy a book. They can destroy a play. These are known facts. When you add the high cost of putting on a play compared to the low cost of printing a book, it becomes inadvisable to write plays if you can write books. Arthur is conducting his profession sensibly from that viewpoint."
"Ah, but there's nothing like a play!" Nancy said, her eyes shining in the glow of the marquee as the taxi drew up at last in front of the theatre. "Look at this crowd! My God, look at them marching down the street through the wind and rain just to see Art's play!"
The mother said, "Lot of fools getting their feet wet because they've got nothing better to do. Art was smart to stay in Italy. What does he care? He's a great author, and he makes lots of money. You be careful now, Nancy."
Weltmann stood in the wind beside the chauffeur, helping Nancy out of the car. She moved with the awkwardness of a heavily pregnant woman. "Oh, you're crazy, mama! Art should have come. He'll regret it as long as he lives."
From Gus Adam's blank expression, it would have been very hard to guess that he had spent the day with Youngblood Hawke in his Wall Street office, executing legal documents.
3
There are few more exciting noises in the world than the growl of a gathering audience, heard through a theatre curtain by the actors on stage. When it is a first-night audience, the growl has a special quality in it, quite unmistakable: it is gayer, louder, more eager, and the note of menace is stronger.
The cast of Alms for Oblivion was gathered on the stage for last-minute comments by Georges Feydal and Pierce Carmian; but the actors were listening less to them than to the growl, and they all looked ill at ease and dejected. An assistant stage manager, in his shirt sleeves, strangely pale among the painted actors, came hurrying to Feydal and whispered in his ear. The fat actor showed extreme amazement. "Excuse me, won't you? Pierce will carry on. I'll return in a moment," he said to the cast, and he ambled swiftly off the set.
Arthur Hawke stood just inside the stage door in a dripping gray raincoat of a loose British cut, holding a cap that ran water. His hair was long and disorderly, his face white.
"My dear Hawke, what an absolutely electrifying surprise! Why damn you, how wonderful! What an entrance! You've upstaged us all! How are you, old cock?" Feydal threw his thick arms around the author.
"Tired," Hawke said hoarsely, in a Southern accent which seemed to have thickened in Europe. "Dog tah'd. Ah had to flah back on urgent business, so Ah thought Ah ought to drop in on the play."
"Hawke, you've been sent from Heaven. Will you talk to the cast?"
"My God, no."
"Listen to me, they need it badly, they're terribly stale. They're in panic. Coming into New York after eight months of pushover road audiences is very hard. In Boston the critics turned ominous. We've had two ghastly previews and they desperately need a shot in the arm, desperately."
"I have nothing to say."
"The sight of you will be enough. Come along, I beg of you. Dear Hawke, the first half hour of this play can sink it out of sight if the actors aren't at their best. Please do as I tell you, it's frightfully important. What a fellow you are, to be sure, showing up like this!"
"Well," Hawke said, and he allowed Feydal to lead him on the stage. The growl from behind the curtain was clamorous, frightening to him.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Alms for Oblivion company," Feydal said, as the actors sitting here and there on the furniture of the setting stared in wonder at the huge wet apparition with whom he had linked arms, "Here is the author of our play, Mr. Youngblood Hawke, come from Italy to see tonight's performance."
With a common impulse, their faces lighting with excitement, the actors and actresses rose to their feet and applauded. Carmian plunged at Hawke and embraced him. "God bless you Hawke! Welcome! What an utterly mad and marvellous man you are!"
Hawke glanced around at the cast, all looking to him expectantly, and wondered what on earth to say. He had not slept on the plane at all. His throat burned and ached; the chill damp of New York, and the oven-dry steam heat, had attacked him at once. It was nightmarish to find himself in this extremely shallow, squeezed-flat, make-believe room which bore a shadowy resemblance to his mother's parlor in Hovey, and to find himself confronted by this array of people painted and dressed like the characters in his first novel. Behind his back, beyond the curtain, the audience growled like a cage full of playing tigers.
He said, in the gravelly tone of a man with a sore throat, "First of all, speaking as a dedicated artist to other dedicated artists, thanks for the large bundle of cash you've already earned for me on the road."
They all laughed a little uncertainly; and Irene Perry, who had sat again in an armchair, in a regal attitude, blew him a kiss. She did not look much like the Aunt Bertha he had imagined, she looked very much like Irene Perry despite the paint, the cane, and the white wig, but she was an arresting presence.
"I'm serious," Hawke said. "I hope we know each other too well, though this is the first time we meet in the flesh, to go through silly pretenses. What we want from those people making that thrilling noise behind me is praise and cash. You've won praise and cash from audiences everywhere for nearly a year with this play. Tonight won't be any different. But I venture that you, like me, want those rewards of success mainly so that we can know that our work has been well done. I feel at home with you because your art is addressed wholly to audiences of plain people, and so is mine. I've never understood art for art's sake, or art for the finicky few. Or rather I do understand it. I admire Joyce and Meredith, but I worship Balzac and Twain.
"This theatre art is yours, not mine. I don't understand the theatre. I think it belongs to players. The best plays have been written by play-actors, like Molière and Shakespeare. I know Shaw never got on a stage, but then he never got off the stage, he never did anything in his life but play-act. This play is really the inspiration of a play-actor, Georges Feydal, and so it works, though it was written by a novelist.
"The whole idea of art, yours or mine, is to tell the truth in a fresh, penetrating, and pleasing way, isn't it? That's all I ever try to do. Tell them the truth tonight, that's all I can say. They're clever and formidable New Yorkers, but they're only people, and their hearts must respond with gratitude, like any human hearts, to the truth beautifully told.
"I'm afraid I'm maundering, but I'm tired. I've come a long way to thank you. Your art is the creating of illusions. Thank you for successfully carrying off the greatest possible illusion, that Youngblood Hawke can write a play."
Hawke did not know actors; he imagined they were jaded sophisticates incapable of being impressed by words, and he was astounded at their eager eyes, their shining faces, and their patter of warm applause when he finished. The noise from behind the curtain was becoming a roar. Irene Perry looked almost ready to cry. Feydal commanded instant silence on stage with a wave of his hand. "We're too close to curtain time for speeches. I cheerfully acknowledge that I invented all the characters and composed every single speech in this sublime play." He only allowed a ripple of laughter, then his authoritative voice cut through. "I knew Shaw well. He never did a better job of play-acting in his life than Youngblood Hawke has just done, last-minute entrance and all. If that's really the test then you're all looking at America's greatest young playwright—as if you didn't know."
Irene Perry rose and stepped forward in the excited laughter and applause. "May I respond for the cast? We've all heard the word we've been needing for several weeks. Our job is to tell the truth. Nothing else. We are going to tell the truth tonight, Mr. Hawke, the truth you've put in our mouths to speak, and we're going to do our best to please. Pierce, we're ready for the curtain any time you are."
4
The lights in the smoky lobby blinked. Celebrities and nobodies took last puffs on their cigarettes and began to move into the theatre. But some of the nobodies lingered, because limousines and taxis were still disgorging people. A blonde movie star blew in, clutching her wrap and hair in a glittering spatter of rain, accompanied by a notorious homosexual novelist about five feet tall, with a peculiarly gray face. The next few arrivals looked like mere millionaires with their wives—arrogant in bearing and most elegantly dressed, but not recognizable. Then an old United States senator appeared, with a frail aristocratic wife in a black velvet cloak on his arm. More rich well-dressed nonentities trickled in—actually the Princes and the Laxes, followed by six very tall men and women jovially cursing the New York weather in Texas accents—and then, for the diehard starers, came a first-class thrill: out of a black limousine, in a dead fall of the wind, stepped Mrs. Frieda Winter, her face alive with self-confidence and pleasure, her eyes wide and shining, her tiara like a coronet. Over her sweeping dress she wore a coat of the same blue-gray silk trimmed with dark fur. The noise in the lobby died down before her, as the wind had died down. She joked with the company manager at the door while her husband brought the tickets out of his pocket. Then she swept into the theatre.
The wave of talking and head-turning occasioned in the orchestra by the arrival of the blonde movie star was just subsiding. Now came a slow rise in the noise, and a general turn of heads toward Frieda as she entered the aisle and sauntered down toward the stage. Her bearing was proud and casual, her smiles and handwaves were like a queen's at a lawn party. It took her only a minute or so to walk past seventeen rows to her seat, but this minute justified all her hours and hours of grooming, and all her lavish outlay on dress and gems.
Jeanne Fry, sitting among the Hodge Hathaway people in the fourteenth row of the theatre, well back of the fashionable section, said to Karl as Frieda paced past, "What's gone wrong? The band isn't playing 'Hail to the Chief.' "
Four rows down, barely within the insiders' limits, irritated at sitting amid people she did not recognize, Fanny Prince said to Ferdie Lax, "My God, that tiara! How is it the diamonds don't spell out 'Youngblood Hoke slept here?' "
Among the hundreds of faces turned toward Frieda there were perhaps twenty that would have been recognized in a newspaper photograph by any ordinary American. There were about a hundred more people whose names were well-known if their faces were not. These luminaries were at the bright core of the seating plan in the first eight rows, mainly in the center section. From there outward the importance of the faces and the lustre of the reputations gradually dimmed. But few people in that whole orchestra did not have either notoriety, or a connection with the play (like the Hodge Hathaway contingent), or a lot of money. There were even some persons of minor consequence in the first two rows of the balcony, which was otherwise filled by nondescript humans. Nearly all these spectators, famous and anonymous alike, witnessing Frieda Winter's arrival, had something excited or jocular to say to one another. The buzz at her entrance swelled, and became the buzz of the evening; it was, indeed, the rising roar that Hawke heard from behind the curtain at the moment that he finished addressing the players. Frieda had not underrated her place in the evening's ceremonies. To say that she enjoyed the sensation she created would hardly be enough. It was probably the pleasantest and most thrilling moment of her life. She had attended hundreds of first nights; the ritual was second nature to her, and for that reason all its nuances were both familiar and momentous. She had never hoped to sweep first-nighters into a mighty buzz like an actress or a president; but thanks to her open adultery with Youngblood Hawke she achieved, on this night, the grand accolade of fashionable New York.
By a stroke of luck she was even able to prolong the moment and the sensation after she reached her seat. A handsome small swarthy man with blondish hair, in an Italian dinner jacket, rose from the adjoining seat to greet her, so that Frieda remained standing with the eyes of all the audience upon her, while she smiled and nodded and shook hands with the man and with the woman beside him. Then she sank into her seat, accepting an opened program from her husband without looking around at him, still talking to the neighboring couple.
They were Manuel and Honor Hauptmann. She had met them at parties given by movie people, and of course she had known Honor for years as a quenched saturnine girl drifting in the wake of the brilliant Anne Karen. Honor looked all different now: plump, creamy, ablaze with diamonds on neck and arms, her bosom overflowing a black dress recognizable to Frieda as a Paris original. Yet Honor still retained a trace of the peevish look with which she had once followed her mother about. Her double chin and her fat hands bespoke a woman who could not stop herself from eating pastries and chocolates. Frieda knew that Hawke had struck up an acquaintance with the Hauptmanns in Europe, so she was not surprised to hear Honor say that they had flown up from Peru for this opening. People like the Hauptmanns could and did fly across an ocean to attend an amusing party. The two women were still talking about Hawke, with Manuel Hauptmann sitting smiling and silent between them, when the footlights cast a roseate glow on the curtain, the house lights went down, and the audience noise died.
5
The curtain had only been up a few seconds when Hawke entered the theatre and dropped into a side seat in the last row, vacated for him by the company manager. The author was startled at the lifelike beauty of the setting, seen under lights from the dark auditorium. The flattened, crudely painted fake room was now eerily like the parlor of his youth. He watched the play unfold with almost the same curiosity as any other spectator. He did not know what Feydal had done with it. The actor's first suggested revisions, a long time ago, had plunged him into two days of melancholy rage. He had resolved to put the play out of his mind, leaving it to the theatre butchers for good or ill, and he had done so.
Feydal had, he now saw, cleverly opened the play with a snippet from the very end of the book: a fight between the handy man and the maid, after the aunt's death, over a kitchen table that both wanted to steal. By the change of a few words the scene now comically foreshadowed the greedy battles of the family over the aunt's property, and established her failing health. Hawke wondered why he had not thought of this trick himself; Shakespeare and Shaw loved to start their plays with a quarrel of minor characters.
This scene went well, but then the heavy lump came, the summary of the first four hundred pages of his book, which Hawke had put into a scene between the family lawyer and a nephew facing bankruptcy. There was no help for it, the facts of the plot had to be explained. This was the first-act problem of all the plays he had ever studied, and he had done his best. It was a long, long, tedious scene, despite the violent flinging-about of the nephew. Feydal had directed the actor to rant so as to keep up an illusion of drama during the laborious recital, but without avail. Coughs rose from the orchestra. Hawke saw people lean their heads together and whisper, or glance at their programs. In the seat in front of him a young man in dark gray flannel with a close-cropped head said in a heavy New York accent to the beautiful girl beside him, "Christ, this thing is a bomb."
In the documents Hawke had signed that afternoon, which gave him a half interest in Paumanok Plaza in exchange for all his rights in this play, the probable total royalty income—based on the assumption that the show would be a smash hit, with road companies—had been calculated at two hundred fifty thousand dollars. He had undertaken to make up the difference in cash if the play earned less than that. He had flown back from Europe to execute those papers; and already the whole scheme seemed to be going glimmering! He wondered whether Scott would let him out of the contract if the show proved a disaster. He was terribly tense.
Irene Perry staggered on stage, clutching her side. The audience roused itself into applause. She timed her stumbling so as to allow for a long pause dead center stage, where she wavered, leaning on her stick, gasping, and clawing at the air, until the clapping subsided. She finished her beautiful stagger to a couch at the far end of the stage, fell on it, and exclaimed in a voice of rich power, "Ah am dying. Call the family. Call Judge Thompson." The show was on.
Hawke became caught up as though he had written neither the book nor the play. Alms for Oblivion was distant to him, he had written three books since, more than a million words. It struck him for the first time how much his huge complicated first novel owed to Mark Twain's brief story, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. As the members of the family one after the other bared their characters under the gravitational pull of the aunt's wealth, and one by one fell into dishonesty, lying, and treachery, a real coarse picture took shape of small-town American life with its various crisscrossing stresses, all traceable at last to the need or the greed for money. The scene that closed the first act, in which the aunt learned from the doctor that her old game had become reality, and that she really was dying, was very good. It was straight out of the book. Irene Perry faded in a few moments from a happily malignant crone, glorying in her mischievous vitality, into a terror-stricken old woman; she was appealing in her helplessness and fear, and she brought the spectre of death visibly to the stage. When she stiffened into an acceptance of her fate, and went to the telephone to call her lawyer, she became grand. Applause burst from the audience before the curtain began to fall; and when the house lights came on the young man with the bristly head yawned, stretched, and said to his companion, "Smash."
