Kitabı oku: «Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel», sayfa 17

As for that, it might have been merely her fancy that Lontaine thenceforward betrayed a disposition to keep out of her way, and when he couldn't was at pains to iron out the wrinkles in his temper before venturing to respond to her always friendly advances; that perceptible hesitation prefaced the utterances Lontaine addressed to her, constraint had crept into their relations, till then so easy and cordial, and added opacity was to be remarked in the stare of those introspective blue eyes.

Since it was unthinkable that she should be long embarrassed, for want of ready money, or that Lontaine should believe she could be, Lucinda couldn't imagine why he should show such signals of a mind perturbed, and could only do her best to dwell upon the matter not at all. Heaven knew she had other worries a-plenty to cope with!

It was annoying, for example, to feel that one was expected to feign blindness to what was going on under one's very nose, namely Fanny's essays in the ancient and vulgar art of vamping, with Bel in the rôle of voluntary victim – or a vastly better actor than he had ever before shown himself to be. Nor did the quite transparent naivete of Fanny's methods, as Lucinda viewed them, cause patience to be any the less a labored virtue. If you asked Lucinda, Hollywood had added no finish to Fanny's cosmopolitan technique of flirtation, but rather the reverse; in this respect, as in too many others, Fanny seemed to have taken on a shade too much the colour of her environment. One looked and made allowances for the crudely obvious in women educated by directors to believe that certain elementary gestures (for which see any screen) were surely efficacious with men of every class alike. But Fanny knew better than to make herself grotesque.

Such, however, was the one word that seemed to suit the way she went with Bellamy. And when one had watched her practise and repeat without end the trick of the upward, sham-timid glance of eyes demurely wise, accompanied by the provocative pout of aggressively kissable life, the look that said openly: I think you're rather nice and I know I am; so why are we wasting time? – and had seen it work an apparently invariable effect upon one who called himself a man of the world, who should long since have graduated from the social kindergartens where such tactics are vogue – well, one simply longed to cuff his ears and tell him to quit being such a silly fool. It gave one furiously to repent having relinquished the right to bestow upon Bel gratuitous advice for his own good.

Wherefore it came to pass that, as a general thing, whenever Fanny was wanted for a scene and was not to be found in the neighbourhood of the set, she would ultimately be discovered somewhere on the lot, more often than not in the most public corner of it, industriously rehearsing her wiles for the debatable benefit of Bellamy.

And this the man who had declared that his besetting sin had lost all savour for him since it had done its part to alienate his wife!

Lucinda nevertheless assured herself that she didn't so much mind Bel's inconsistency – for what were his protestations to her today? – or even Fanny's commonplace coquetries; it was the surreptitious airs with which Fanny sought to envelop these goings-on, the reticence which she persisted in observing in respect of their effect, that made their joint stupidity maddening. For never since that afternoon when Bel had caught Lucinda in the act of kissing Summerlad before a camera, and Fanny had playfully announced her intention of vamping him to a fare-ye-well, had she chosen to mention his name in any relation to herself. In the local vernacular which she had been so quick to pick up, Fanny seemed to think she was getting away with something.

Lucinda resisted the temptation to disillusion her friend mostly because of a faint-hearted hope that Fanny might at any moment redeem herself with a scornful report of Bel's gullibility, but in part because of doubt whether Bel were being taken in as completely as he appeared to be. It was just possible that this old hand at philandering was simply playing Fanny's game to find out what she meant by it. Certainly he showed no propensity to favouritism. The path of his amourette with the Marquis girl ran parallel to that which he pursued with Fanny, perhaps ran faster, but strangely proved not half so tiresome to the spectator. In spite of all that Summerlad had said of her, Lucinda entertained an honest admiration for the Marquis as she was today, considered her physically quite a fascinating creature, which she unquestionably was in this revised phase, and found what Bel saw in her far more easy to understand than what he saw in Fanny. This was something partly to be accounted for by the circumstance that Lucinda saw comparatively so little of Miss Marquis, saw her so seldom save at a distance and when she was on her dignity – when, as Summerlad had it, she had slapped on thick the make-up of a lady. That it was in good measure make-up merely Lucinda had memories to testify. For all that, she saw the girl comporting herself toward Bellamy with a manner which she thought Fanny might have copied to good profit. But when she confided as much to Summerlad she found him darkly suspicious of Nelly's present good behaviour.

"Don't worry," he advised: "That young woman will surprise you yet. She's being nice now and enjoying the novelty. Chances are she took the cure, that time she disappeared. But it never lasts. Once the old hop gets its hooks into anybody it never lets go, really. It may seem to be licked for a while, but it's only waiting for a moment of weakness. Wait till Nelly gets bored playing up to the gentlemanly attentions of your friend, Mr. Druce, wait till she wants him to do something he doesn't want to. Just wait. If you admire fireworks, believe me, Linda, your waiting won't be wasted."

Having said which, Summerlad made haste to change the subject. But Lucinda had already learned that any reference to Nelly Marquis was calculated to make him restive. A circumstance in itself not the least irksome of the many which she counted as afflictions. She needed badly a congenial confidant, and Lynn was newly become anything but that, had, indeed, never seemed quite the same since the first night of his return. Another black mark to add to Bellamy's score. For Lynn was inevitably and pardonably disgusted with the situation at the studio, where he couldn't turn around without running into either the Marquis girl or the husband of the woman he loved. Then much of the old delight in sharing working-quarters had been lost through their tacit agreement that, under these changed conditions, a trifle more reserve wouldn't come amiss when they met under the public eye. But now, even when they were alone, the old-time spontaneity was missing, and, Lucinda was sure, through no fault of hers. It was in Lynn that she thought to detect a strange new absence of ease, what she could almost have termed a hang-dog air, a furtive fashion of watching her, if he thought she wasn't aware, that was swift to change, as soon as he found she was, to a species of feeble bravado distastefully reminiscent of Bel when Bel had been drinking just enough to feel it and not enough to have become callous; an air of having done something he oughtn't and living in instant dread of being found out.

Lynn had such an air with her, that is, if Lucinda were not self-deceived, if she didn't imagine it all, if it were anything but an hallucination conjured up by a mind morbidly conscious of Bel's shadow in the offing, the shadow of that relationship which, while unresolved, must ever rest between the lover and the wife.

XXXIV

But these peculiar tribulations rankled neither severally nor even in their sum more distressfully than did the trouble at the studio, where daily the tension of ill-feeling between actress and director grew more taut, as Lucinda's earlier misgivings ripened into articulate dissatisfaction with Nolan's methods and their fruits, and as that sensitive artistic soul reacted deplorably, in terms of begrudged civility at best, and at other times of stubborn Celtic oppugnancy.

Dilatory tactics in directing had become too fast a habit with Nolan to be broken at will, and had forced him to forego his chance at that attractive job in the East. For which, of course, he would never forgive Lucinda. And he was otherwise so fed up with the feeling that he was unappreciated, that he had taken to fuming nastily over every set-back which put off the final "take" by so much as an hour, and indeed was more than once only restrained from "walking off the lot and leaving the picture flat" by the consideration that he had as yet been able to wheedle out of Lontaine a mere niggardly half of his contract fee in advance.

Aware of what was in the air, the supporting players held their collective breath against that explosion which all felt was due at any moment to hoist them into the same element and leave them there, belike, in indefinite suspense. Individually they went with a nice if naïve diplomacy in all their dealings with Miss Lee and Mr. Nolan individually; for who could foresay whose hands would hold the symbols of power when the dust had settled? But the sympathies of the producing staffs, to a man, Lucinda was sensible, were with Nolan; and though this nettled her at times, she consoled herself with the reflection that it was after all only natural, since the best directors, that is to say those with the most artful and resourceful press-agents, hand-pick their lieutenants as a general custom and carry them along as they lightly flit from berth to berth. And she derived a little comfort from the belief that the cameraman was on her side.

Cameramen, being highly trained specialists in an exacting art, are more often than not men of independent minds, iconoclastic in their attitude toward the directors with whom they work. Iturbide was of this tribe. He knew his trade, not Nolan or any other could instruct him in it. If he reckoned the light not right for any take, that scene would wait though Nolan raved and the heavens quaked. In the choice of the right angle for any shot his judgment was final, even Nolan learned in time not to dispute it. And he accomplished his will with a singular economy of words and emotion, the more remarkable in view of the mercurial temper with which tradition accredits the race from whom he sprang. He was Mexican, a tall and rangey body, with eyes as beautiful as a woman's, and much to the silken courtesy of the Spanish whose blood he shared. "No, Mr. Nolan," he would announce in a strongly accented and resonant voice, shaking his head sorrowfully after setting up his camera and assaying the light by peering through a strip of negative film exposed behind the lens – "no, I no take – light no good. Tomorrow we take, maybe light better then." And while Nolan, who as like as not had voluptuously kept a regiment of extra people waiting all day to work in this the last hour of the afternoon – while Nolan spluttered and swore and offered to go down on his knees if prayers would move Iturbide to change his mind, the cameraman would be placidly superintending the demounting of his camera, and pocketing the darling lens whose care he never would trust to hands other than his own. And that scene would not be taken until the next day – not then, if the light were not exactly to Iturbide's liking. Which was one among a number of reasons why his photography was credited with having saved many a picture otherwise without virtue.

Scrupulous always to avoid giving unprovoked offense, in the series of skirmishes which made the final two weeks of Nolan's engagement memorable, Iturbide played the part of benevolent neutral; but if Lucinda were not mistaken in her reading of his eyes, the best of his benevolence was reserved for her.

Historically – and setting aside minor clashes of opinion as mere affairs of outposts – the private war progressed to its conclusion in three stages, which for convenience may be named the Battle of the Supper Club Set, the Affair of the Comedy Feet, and the Last Stand in the Living-Room Doorway.

In the novel from which the picture in production took its name and little else, most of the plot development was worked out in a fashionable supper club, where Lucinda in the character of a professional dancer, figured nightly as what for some reason New York that stays up nights knows by the name of "hostess." The rooms of the club as described bore close resemblance to the premises for years tenanted by the Club de Vingt in East Fifty-eighth street, to whose general plan, however, fanciful embellishments had been added in an effort to make it a frame worthy of the dancer's charms.

Over the lay-out, or scheme, for this set, Lucinda had spent many hours and much thought – before Nolan found time to give the production any attention whatever – in consultation with Harry Lontaine and Mr. Coakley, the talented young man who served the Zinn Studios in the capacity of general technical director: an office which as organized by the motion-picture trade, comprehends those – among others – of architect, landscape-gardener, scene, house, sign and artist-painter, interior decorator, and amateur of the art of every era, from the Eolithic to that of East Aurora. And in the end Lucinda had turned to her work before the camera well-satisfied that Mr. Coakley knew what to do and how to do it, and would assemble an excellently suitable room if left to exercise his own good taste and ingenuity.

The most pretentious bit of building required by the production, the supper club was the last to be erected, and wasn't ready till the beginning of the fourth week of Nolan's reign; as Lucinda learned it was, one evening, when the assistant-director circulated a call for the entire company to work on it the next day.

Accordingly, Lucinda and Fanny strolled over to the main stage, where, behind a flimsy fence of sides – frames of wood and paint-smeared canvas held up by struts – the precincts of the supper-club basked in the cynical glare of Cooper-Hewitts overhead.

Inside the barricade, Lucinda halted with a cry of shocked remonstrance.

In the middle of the floor, upon which she was to give the solo dance which she had been weeks rehearsing under a veteran professional, Nolan stood vivaciously lining out tomorrow's proposed campaign for the benefit of a group composed of his first assistant, Mr. Wells, Iturbide and the second cameraman, and Mr. Coakley.

There was nothing else to break the full force of the blow which fate had prepared for Lucinda's expectations.

Of the gay, exquisite scheme upon which she and Coakley had agreed, guided by the novel, there wasn't a sign. The main masses of woodwork were here all a dull, blank black. The panels, which were to have framed baskets of fruit and garlands of flowers, in low poly-chrome relief-work, had yielded place to paintings in the style of French posters, of women in antic postures and clothed only enough to accent their nakedness. The little tables that lined the walls were dressed with cloths checquered staringly in red and white. The imbecile geometry of the Cubists had patterned all the draperies and upholstery materials in weird juxtapositions of colour apparently intended to give away the grisly cosmic secret that there was something rotten in the solar spectrum. And at the far end of the room there was… Lucinda looked twice to make sure her eyes did not deceive her. But, no; there it was: a bar, a veritable zinc of the common Parisian cabaret.

And while she gaped aghast, hysterically torn by a desire to scream with lunatic laughter and an impulse to weep and dance with rage, Nolan spied her and, deserting his audience, tripped briskly over, beaming happily.

"Well, Miss Lee! how about it, eh? A little slice off the top of the real Bohemia, I'll tell the world. And wait till you see how she screens. O bay-bee! but this glad young set's gonna photograph like a million dollars."

Lucinda choked down the anger with which her lips were tremulous. For an instant she stared hopelessly at Nolan, comprehending that this vile parody of the design she had approved was due wholly to his arbitrary action in contradicting the plans without reference to her wishes. And she could have cried with disappointment and vexation. As a matter of simple fact, her eyes did fill in that bitter moment when she was made poignantly aware of how high her hopes had been and how heartlessly frustrated, and how helpless she was to express a tithe of her indignation without jeopardizing the good of the picture.

If she spoke her mind it were inconceivable that Nolan should consent to continue as director. And grave and well-grounded as was her dissatisfaction with him, Lucinda was not yet ready to believe it would benefit the picture to have it finished by another intelligence than that under whose guidance it had been so ill-begun.

And it is by this that the potential artistic stature of Linda Lee is to be reckoned, that in this the young beginning of her career she had already learned, what many who walk with the great ones of the screen have never learned and are incapable of learning, to think of her work before herself, to esteem her rôle as something less than the story which gave it excuse for being, to hold the welfare of the picture as a picture more important than her own.

While still she faltered, fearing to speak her mind, Coakley came up with the others. To him she turned reproachfully.

"Oh, Mr. Coakley! why did you do this?"

Before Coakley could reply Nolan cut in irritably: "Do what? What's the matter now?"

"I'm asking Mr. Coakley why he didn't carry out the design we agreed on for the supper club."

Coakley grinned and scratched an ear. "Mr. Nolan's ideas, Miss Lee," he drawled uncomfortably.

"Mr. Nolan ordered this change?"

Nolan brusquely interposed: "Of course, I did. What's wrong with the set?"

"And you didn't consult me, Mr. Coakley?"

"I supposed you knew, Miss Lee."

"Say, listen here!" Nolan snapped – "what's the grand idea? I said I was responsible for this set, didn't I? I gave Coakley's lay-out the once-over, saw it wouldn't do, and told him what I wanted. And why wouldn't I? Look't what we got. Not much like that glorified tea-room you were satisfied with, is it?"

"No, Mr. Nolan – not much. I grant you that."

"Well, then, what's the big objection?"

"Simply that the set is out of harmony with the rest of the picture – "

"Out of harmony! Why, it's going to make the picture! You ask Harry Iturbide here. He'll tell you, when that set's flashed on the screen it's going to knock your eye out."

"I'm sure he will," Lucinda agreed, smiling at the cameraman.

"Well, Harry?" Nolan insisted – "what about it? Who's got the rights of this argument?"

"Miss Lee," the cameraman said, sententious.

"Miss Lee has! Say: how do you make that out?"

"You don't want to make your background too prominent, Mr. Nolan," Iturbide explained patiently. "This set is going to stick out in front of the actors. You won't be able to see what they're doing against a checker-board like that."

"Ah, you give me a pain!" Nolan retorted crushingly. "That background's all right – going to photograph like a million dollars, I tell you."

"But, Mr. Nolan," Lucinda resumed with more confidence: "don't you see that the set is completely out of key with the atmosphere of the story? It isn't in the least like the supper club the author described."

"Bet your sweet life it isn't! Look here: I read that story, and I know all about it, and I can show you where the author was all wrong with his idea of the kind of a joint Nelly was running – "

"It wasn't what you call a 'joint,' to begin with, Mr. Nolan."

"That's just the very point I'm trying to make. If it isn't a joint you're dancing in, where's Richards get off with his kicking about you not being good enough to marry his son? It's got to be a joint, or there won't be any sense in the way he fusses when he finds out you and Dick are stepping out together. If that place in the book wasn't a joint, I'm a kike!" Nolan paused in triumph to let his argument sink in. "Now" – he brandished a hand at the set – "this is a joint, and a regular one, if you want to know. Some class to this. I doped it all out myself. Take those tablecloths, now: that's the identical kind they were using in Montmartre last time I was in New York. And those panels on the walls – I got the idea for them from Reisenweber's Paradise Room, only these are sportier. And that black woodwork and all… Why, we've taken the best points of all the classiest joints in New York and lumped them into one set, and improved on them at that. Now when this poor fish of a Richards sees his son dancing with you in a joint like this, he'll have some excuse for claiming you ain't all you might be."

"The trouble is," Lucinda replied gravely – "I mean, from your viewpoint the trouble will be —Richards will never see Dick dancing with me in this set."

"What's the reason he won't?"

Lucinda smiled slightly, shook her head slightly, slightly shrugged. In the course of Nolan's harangue it had been revealed to her that no greater calamity could possibly be visited upon the picture than to permit its essential colour of good taste to be vitiated by the introduction of this purely atrocious set. It would be like asking the public to believe that people accustomed to sup and dance in the Crystal Room at the Ritz had transferred their favour to the roughest cabaret in the purlieus of Longacre Square.

"What's the reason he won't?" Nolan repeated, raising his voice angrily.

"Because I won't work on this set, Mr. Nolan – until it is restored to the design I approved."

"But – my Gawd! – you can't do that, Miss Lee – you can't hold up this production like that. Why, it'll take weeks – "

"How long will it take, please, Mr. Coakley?"

"Well, I don't know, Miss Lee – I might be able to rush it through for you in a week or ten days."

"There!" Nolan obtruded an excited smirk and weaving hands between Lucinda and the technical director. "You hear what Coakley says. Ten days! You can't hold up this production ten days, Miss Lee."

"I can," Lucinda corrected coldly, "and will, no matter how long it takes to make this set resemble a place self-respecting people would patronize."

"But – listen here! – you can't go to work and upset all my plans at the last moment, like this. Company called for half-past eight – fifty extra people hired for four days' work – orchestra from the Alexandria and all – the best caterer in Los Angeles engaged to serve the eats – ! You can't throw me down like this – "

"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan. You should have consulted me before ordering such changes on your own responsibility – "

"Look here: am I directing this picture, or ain't I?"

"I'll answer that question when you answer mine: Am I paying for this production or are you? And if I am, are you the only one whose wishes are to be considered?"

"Listen, now, Miss Lee." Nolan made a frantic effort to be calm and urbane. He swallowed hard. "Listen: I don't want to have any trouble with you, but you're making it all-fired hard for me. I've been in this business ever since there was a studio in Hollywood, I've directed hundreds of productions, hundreds of 'em, I ought to know my business – "

"It was on that assumption precisely that you were hired," Lucinda reminded him sweetly.

"But ever since I been working with you, I've felt – you've made me feel – damn it! you've been watching me and thinking sarcastic things about the way I do – "

"Did you never before suspect you were psychic, Mr. Nolan?"

"And now you openly criticize my judgment about this set and say you won't work on it – "

"You understand me exactly," Lucinda assented.

"You mean that?"

She nodded.

"Well, that – settles – it!" Nolan flung both hands above his head and waggled them insanely. "That settles it! I'm through – I'm finished – done! I'm out! I quit!"

He hesitated a single instant, searching Lucinda's face to see it blench at this awful threat; and in disappointment whirled on a heel and barged out of the set so blindly that he blundered into one of the frames and knocked it flat.

Lucinda nodded quietly to the technical man.

"Please make the changes as soon as you can, Mr. Coakley. It's all right: don't apologize any more. I quite understand it wasn't your fault."

The president of Linda Lee Inc. wasn't in his office, neither was his car in the parking yard; but Nolan evidently knew where to find him, for Lucinda had not been twenty minutes in her rooms at the Hollywood when Lontaine's knuckles rattled on the door. His agitation, when she admitted him, was intense, almost pitiable. One gathered that he considered a tiff between star and director a catastrophe second only to national censorship of pictures. He stammered painfully over his account of Nolan's ultimatum, which had been accompanied by a demand for the balance of his pay in full and at once.

"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda …"

"He hasn't had time to get my letter."

"I don't suppose – you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."

"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"

"But he claims you as good as fired him – "

"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that misstatement of fact… "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll have to hire himself on again."

And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communiqué to the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.

Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's eyes…

To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical, though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.

In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.

"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely, "is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right, really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over their surprise.

"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."

Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as he conceived it, had no business to find place.

Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy, the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.

If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled; in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by the board, for very lack of space.

Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she took no part.

And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.

Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view to lending distinction to her début.

By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet, Nelly's (that is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up, after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.