The Last Tycoon

“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I’ve had no time to ask you.” She sat down beside me and buckled us both in. “Do you want some gum?”

This reminded me to get rid of the piece that had been boring me for hours. I wrapped it in a piece of magazine and put it into the automatic ash-holder.

“I can always tell people are nice,” the stewardess said approvingly, “if they wrap their gum in paper before they put it in there.”

We sat for awhile in the half-light of the swaying car. It was vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. We were all lingering—and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, had to keep reminding herself why she was there.

She and I talked about a young actress I knew, whom she had flown West with two years before. It was in the very lowest time of the depression, and the young actress kept staring out the window in such an intent way that the stewardess was afraid she was contemplating a leap. It appeared though that she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.

“I know what mother and I are going to do,” she confided to the stewardess. “We’re coming out to the Yellowstone and we’re just going to live simply till it all blows over. Then we’ll come back. They don’t kill artists—you know?”

The proposition pleased me. It conjured up a pretty picture of the actress and her mother being fed by kind Tory bears who brought them honey, and by gentle fawns who fetched extra milk from the does and then lingered near to make pillows for their heads at night. In turn I told the stewardess about the lawyer and the director who told their plans to Father one night in those brave days. If the bonus army conquered Washington, the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back “because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out the legal side.”

The director had tended more toward defeatism. He had an old suit, shirt and shoes in waiting—he never did say whether they were his own or whether he got them from the prop department—and he was going to Disappear into the Crowd. I remember Father saying: “But they’ll look at your hands! They’ll know you haven’t done manual work for years. And they’ll ask for your union card.” And I remember how the director’s face fell, and how gloomy he was while he ate his dessert, and how funny and puny they sounded to me.

“Is your father an actor, Miss Brady?” asked the stewardess. “I’ve certainly heard the name.”

At the name Brady, both the men across the aisle looked up. Sidewise—that Hollywood look, that always seems thrown over one shoulder. Then the young, pale, stocky man unbuttoned his safety strap and stood in the aisle beside us.

“Are you Cecilia Brady?” he demanded accusingly, as if I’d been holding out on him. “I thought I recognized you. I’m Wylie White.”

He could have omitted this—for at the same moment a new voice said, “Watch your step, Wylie!,” and another man brushed by him in the aisle and went forward in the direction of the cockpit. Wylie White started, and a little too late called after him defiantly:

“I only take orders from the pilot.”

I recognized the kind of pleasantry that goes on between the powers in Hollywood and their satellites.

The stewardess reproved him:

“Not so loud, please—some of the passengers are asleep.”

I saw now that the other man across the aisle, the middle-aged Jew, was on his feet also, staring with shameless economic lechery, after the man who had just gone by. Or rather at the back of the man, who gestured sideways with his hand in a sort of farewell, as he went out of my sight.

I asked the stewardess: “Is he the assistant pilot?”

She was unbuckling our belt, about to abandon me to Wylie White.

“No. That’s Mr. Smith. He has the private compartment, the ‘bridal suite’—only he has it alone. The assistant pilot is always in uniform.” She stood up: “I want to find out if we’re going to be grounded in Nashville.”

Wylie White was aghast.

“Why?”

“It’s a storm coming up in the Mississippi Valley.”

“Does that mean we’ll have to stay here all night?”

“If this keeps up!”

A sudden dip indicated that it would. It tipped Wylie White into the seat opposite me, shunted the stewardess precipitately down in the direction of the cockpit, and plunked the Jewish man into a sitting position. After the studied, unruffled exclamations of distaste that befitted the air-minded, we settled down. There was an introduction.

“Miss Brady—Mr. Schwartz,” said Wylie White. “He’s a great friend of your father’s, too.”

Mr. Schwartz nodded so vehemently that I could almost hear him saying: “It’s true. As God is my judge, it’s true!”

He might have said this right out loud at one time in his life—but he was obviously a man to whom something had happened. Meeting him was like encountering a friend who has been in a fist fight or collision, and got flattened. You stare at your friend and say: “What happened to you?” And he answers something unintelligible through broken teeth and swollen lips. He can’t even tell you about it.

Mr. Schwartz was physically unmarked; the exaggerated Persian nose and oblique eye shadow were as congenital as the tip-tilted Irish redness around my father’s nostrils.

“Nashville!” cried Wylie White. “That means we go to an hotel. We don’t get to the coast till tomorrow night—if then. My God! I was born in Nashville.”

“I should think you’d like to see it again.”

“Never—I’ve kept away for fifteen years. I hope I’ll never see it again.”

But he would—for the plane was unmistakably going down, down, down, like Alice in the rabbit hole. Cupping my hand against the window I saw the blur of the city far away on the left. The green sign “Fasten your belts—No smoking” had been on since we first rode into the storm.

“Did you hear what he said?” said Schwartz from one of his fiery silences across the aisle.

“Hear what?” asked Wylie.

“Hear what he’s calling himself,” said Schwartz. “Mr. Smith!”

“Why not?” asked Wylie.

“Oh, nothing,” said Schwartz quickly. “I just thought it was funny. Smith.” I never heard a laugh with less mirth in it: “Smith!”

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the days of the stage-stops—nothing quite as lonely, as somber-silent. The old red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked—people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity. In the big trans-continental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America. High adventure might be among us, disguised as a movie star. But mostly it wasn’t. And I always wished fervently that we looked more interesting than we did—just as I often have at premières, when the fans look at you with scornful reproach because you’re not a star.

On the ground Wylie and I were suddenly friends because he held out his arm to steady me when I got out of the plane. From then on, he made a dead set for me—and I didn’t mind. From the moment we walked into the airport it had become plain that if we were stranded here we were stranded here together. (It wasn’t like the time I lost my boy—the time my boy played the piano with that girl Reina in a little New England farmhouse near Bennington, and I realized at last I wasn’t wanted. Guy Lombardo was on the air playing Top Hat and Cheek to Cheek, and she taught him the melodies. The keys falling like leaves and her hands splayed over his as she showed him a black chord. I was a freshman then.)

When we went into the airport Mr. Schwartz was along with us, too, but he seemed in a sort of dream. All the time we were trying to get accurate information at the desk, he kept staring at the door that led out to the landing field, as if he were afraid the plane would leave without him. Then I excused myself for a few minutes and something happened that I didn’t see, but when I came back he and White were standing close together, White talking and Schwartz looking twice as much as if a great truck had just backed up over him. He didn’t stare at the door to the landing field any more. I heard the end of Wylie White’s remark …

“—I told you to shut up. It serves you right.”

“I only said—”

He broke off as I came up and asked if there was any news. It was then half-past two in the morning.

“A little,” said Wylie White. “They don’t think we’ll be able to start for three hours anyhow, so some of the softies are going to an hotel. But I’d like to take you out to the Hermitage, Home of Andrew Jackson.”

“How could we see it in the dark?” demanded Schwartz.

“Hell, it’ll be sunrise in two hours.”

“You two go,” said Schwartz.

“All right—you take the bus to the hotel. It’s still waiting—he’s in there.” Wylie’s voice had a taunt in it. “Maybe it’d be a good thing.”