The stewardess doubled up with laughter – and I could have spit at her.
“I mean calling all those people a hatful of nuts. I mean cracked nuts.” Her laughter stopped with unexpected suddenness, and her face was grave as she stood up. “Well, I’ve got to finish my chart.”
“Goodbye.”
Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for awhile. Years later I travelled with one of those same pilots and he told me one thing Stahr had said.
He was looking down at the mountains.
“Suppose you were a railroad man,” he said. “You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors’ reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to decide – on what basis? You can’t test the best way – except by doing it. So you just do it.”
The pilot thought he had missed something.
“How do you mean?”
“You choose some one way for no reason at all – because that mountain’s pink or the blueprint is a better blue. You see?”
The pilot considered that this was very valuable advice. But he doubted if he’d ever be in a position to apply it.
“What I wanted to know,” he told me ruefully, “is how he ever got to be Mr. Stahr.”
I’m afraid Stahr could never have answered that one; for the embryo is not equipped with a memory. But I could answer a little. He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously – finally frantically – and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.
The motors were off, and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific. However I happened to feel about these things – and they were home, after all – I know that Stahr must have felt much more. These were the things I had first opened my eyes on, like the sheep on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio; but this was where Stahr had come to earth after that extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him, but I don’t think so. I would rather think that in a “long shot”[32] he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness.
Chapter II
It was nine o’clock of a July night and there were still some extras in the drug-store across from the studio – I could see them bent over the pin-games inside – as I parked my car. “Old” Johnny Swanson stood on the corner in his semi-cowboy clothes, staring gloomily past the moon. Once he had been as big in pictures as Tom Mix or Bill Hart[33] – now it was too sad to speak to him, and I hurried across the street and through the front gate.
There is never a time when a studio is absolutely quiet. There is always a night shift of technicians in the laboratories and dubbing rooms and people on the maintenance staff dropping in at the commissary. But the sounds are all different – the padded hush of tires, the quiet tick of a motor running idle, the naked cry of a soprano singing into a nightbound microphone. Around a corner I came upon a man in rubber boots washing down a car in a wonderful white light – a fountain among the dead industrial shadows. I slowed up as I saw Mr. Marcus being hoisted into his car in front of the administration building, because he took so long to say anything, even good night – and while I waited I realized that the soprano was singing, Come, come, I love you only over and over; I remember this because she kept singing the same line during the earthquake. That didn’t come for five minutes yet.
Father’s offices were in the old building with the long balconies and iron rails with their suggestion of a perpetual tightrope. Father was on the second floor, with Stahr on one side and Mr. Marcus on the other – this evening there were lights all along the row. My stomach dipped a little at the proximity to Stahr, but that was in pretty good control now – I’d seen him only once in the month I’d been home.
There were a lot of strange things about Father’s office, but I’ll make it brief. In the outer part were three poker-faced secretaries who had sat there like witches ever since I could remember – Birdy Peters, Maude something, and Rosemary Schmiel; I don’t know whether this was her name, but she was the dean of the trio, so to speak, and under her desk was the kick-lock that admitted you to Father’s throne room. All three of the secretaries were passionate capitalists, and Birdy had invented the rule that if typists were seen eating together more than once in a single week, they were hauled up on the carpet. At that time the studios feared mob rule.
I went on in. Nowadays all chief executives have huge drawing rooms, but my father’s was the first. It was also the first to have one-way glass in the big French windows[34], and I’ve heard a story about a trap in the floor that would drop unpleasant visitors to an oubliette[35] below, but believe it to be an invention. There was a big painting of Will Rogers[36], hung conspicuously and intended, I think, to suggest Father’s essential kinship with Hollywood’s St. Francis; there was a signed photograph of Minna Davis, Stahr’s dead wife, and photos of other studio celebrities and big chalk drawings of mother and me. Tonight the one-way French windows were open and a big moon, rosy-gold with a haze around, was wedged helpless in one of them. Father and Jacques La Borwitz and Rosemary Schmiel were down at the end around a big circular desk.
What did Father look like? I couldn’t describe him except for once in New York when I met him where I didn’t expect to; I was aware of a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself, and I wished he’d move on – and then I saw he was Father. Afterward I was shocked at my impression. Father can be very magnetic – he has a tough jaw and an Irish smile.
But as for Jacques La Borwitz, I shall spare you. Let me just say he was an assistant producer, which is something like a commissar, and let it go at that. Where Stahr picked up such mental cadavers or had them forced upon him – or especially how he got any use out of them – has always amazed me, as it amazed everyone fresh from the East who slapped up against them. Jacques La Borwitz had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone. Jacques La – oh my!
From their expressions I was sure they had been talking about Stahr. Stahr had ordered something or forbidden something, or defied Father or junked one of La Borwitz’ pictures or something catastrophic, and they were sitting there in protest at night in a community of rebellion and helplessness. Rosemary Schmiel sat pad in hand, as if ready to write down their dejection.
“I’m to drive you home dead or alive,” I told Father. “All those birthday presents rotting away in their packages!”
“A birthday!” cried Jacques in a flurry of apology. “How old? I didn’t know.”
“Forty-three,” said Father distinctly.
He was older than that – four years – and Jacques knew it; I saw him note it down in his account book to use some time. Out here these account books are carried open in the hand. One can see the entries being made without recourse to lip-reading, and Rosemary Schmiel was compelled in emulation to make a mark on her pad.
As she rubbed