The Last Tycoon

“No, I’ll go along with you,” said Schwartz hastily.

We took a taxi in the sudden country dark outside, and he seemed to cheer up. He patted my kneecap encouragingly.

“I should go along,” he said, “I should be chaperone. Once upon a time when I was in the big money, I had a daughter—a beautiful daughter.”

He spoke as if she had been sold to creditors as a tangible asset.

“You’ll have another,” Wylie assured him. “You’ll get it all back. Another turn of the wheel and you’ll be where Cecilia’s papa is, won’t he Cecilia?”

“Where is this Hermitage?” asked Schwartz presently. “Far away at the end of nowhere? Will we miss the plane?”

“Skip it,” said Wylie. “We ought to’ve brought the stewardess along for you. Didn’t you admire the stewardess? I thought she was pretty cute.”

We drove for a long time over a bright level countryside, just a road and a tree and a shack and a tree, and then suddenly along a winding twist of woodland. I could feel even in the darkness that the trees of the woodland were green—that it was all different from the dusty olive-tint of California. Somewhere we passed a Negro driving three cows ahead of him, and they mooed as he scattered them to the side of the road. They were real cows, with warm, fresh, silky flanks, and the Negro grew gradually real out of the darkness with his big brown eyes staring at us close to the car, as Wylie gave him a quarter. He said “Thank you—thank you,” and stood there, and the cows mooed again into the night as we drove off.

I thought of the first sheep I ever remember seeing—hundreds of them, and how our car drove suddenly into them on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio. They were unhappy about being in pictures, but the men in the car with us kept saying:

“Swell!”

“Is that what you wanted, Dick?”

“Isn’t that swell?” And the man named Dick kept standing up in the car as if he were Cortez or Balboa, looking over that gray fleecy undulation. If I ever knew what picture they were in, I have long forgotten.

We had driven an hour. We crossed a brook over an old rattly iron bridge laid with planks. Now there were roosters crowing and blue-green shadows stirring every time we passed a farmhouse.

“I told you it’d be morning soon,” said Wylie. “I was born near here—the son of impoverished southern paupers. The family mansion is now used as an outhouse. We had four servants—my father, my mother and my two sisters. I refused to join the guild, and so I went to Memphis to start my career, which has now reached a dead end.” He put his arm around me: “Cecilia, will you marry me, so I can share the Brady fortune?”

He was disarming enough, so I let my head lie on his shoulder. “What do you do, Celia. Go to school?”

“I go to Bennington. I’m a junior.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have known, but I never had the advantage of college training. But a junior—why I read in Esquire that juniors have nothing to learn, Cecilia.”

“Why do people think that college girls—”

“Don’t apologize—knowledge is power.”

“You’d know from the way you talk that we were on our way to Hollywood,” I said. “It’s always years and years behind the times.”

He pretended to be shocked.

“You mean girls in the East have no private lives?”

“That’s the point. They have got private lives. You’re bothering me, let go.”

“I can’t. It might wake Schwartz, and I think this is the first sleep he’s had for weeks. Listen, Cecilia: I once had an affair with the wife of a producer. A very short affair. When it was over she said to me in no uncertain terms, she said: ‘Don’t you ever tell about this or I’ll have you thrown out of Hollywood. My husband’s a much more important man than you!’”

I liked him again now, and presently the taxi turned down a long lane fragrant with honeysuckle and narcissus, and stopped beside the great grey hulk of the Andrew Jackson house. The driver turned around to tell us something about it, but Wylie shushed him, pointing at Schwartz, and we tiptoed out of the car.

“You can’t get into the Mansion now,” the taxi man told us politely.

Wylie and I went and sat against the wide pillars of the steps.

“What about Mr. Schwartz?” I asked. “Who is he?”

“To hell with Schwartz. He was the head of some combine once—First National? Paramount? United Artists? Now he’s down and out. But he’ll be back. You can’t flunk out of pictures unless you’re a dope or a drunk.”

“You don’t like Hollywood,” I suggested.

“Yes I do. Sure I do. Say! This isn’t anything to talk about on the steps of Andrew Jackson’s house—at dawn.”

“I like Hollywood,” I persisted.

“It’s all right. It’s a mining town in lotus land. Who said that? I did. It’s a good place for toughies, but I went there from Savannah, Georgia. I went to a garden party the first day. My host shook hands and left me. It was all there—that swimming pool, green moss at two dollars an inch, beautiful felines having drinks and fun—

“—And nobody spoke to me. Not a soul. I spoke to half a dozen people but they didn’t answer. That continued for an hour, two hours—then I got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy man. I didn’t feel I had any rightful identity until I got back to the hotel and the clerk handed me a letter addressed to me in my name.”

Naturally I hadn’t ever had such an experience, but looking back on parties I’d been to, I realized that such things could happen. We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood unless they wear a sign saying that their axe has been thoroughly ground elsewhere, and that in any case it’s not going to fall on our necks—in other words, unless they’re a celebrity. And they’d better look out even then.

“You should have risen above it,” I said smugly. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude—it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”

“Such a pretty girl—to say such wise things.”

There was an eager to-do in the eastern sky, and Wylie could see me plain—thin with good features and lots of style, and the kicking fetus of a mind. I wonder what I looked like in that dawn, five years ago. A little rumpled and pale, I suppose, but at that age, when one has the young illusion that most adventures are good, I needed only a bath and a change to go on for hours.

Wylie stared at me with really flattering appreciation—and then suddenly we were not alone. Mr. Schwartz wandered apologetically into the pretty scene.

“I fell upon a large metal handle,” he said, touching the corner of his eye.

Wylie jumped up.

“Just in time, Mr. Schwartz,” he said. “The tour is just starting. Home of Old Hickory—America’s tenth president. The victor of New Orleans, opponent of the National Bank, and inventor of the Spoils System.”

Schwartz looked toward me as toward a jury.

“There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.”

“What’s that?” said Wylie, indignant.

It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

“Ain’t writers like that, Celia?” demanded Schwartz. “I have no words for them. I only know it’s true.”

Wylie looked at him with slowly gathering indignation. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Look, Manny, I’m a more practical man than you any day! I’ve sat in an office and listened to some mystic stalk up and down for hours spouting tripe that’d land him on a nut-farm anywhere outside of California—and then at the end tell me how practical he was, and I was a dreamer—and would I kindly go away and make sense out of what he’d said.”

Mr. Schwartz’s face fell into its more disintegrated alignments. One eye looked upward through the tall elms. He raised his hand and bit without interest at the cuticle on his second finger. There was a bird flying about the chimney of the house, and his glance followed it. It perched on the chimney pot like a raven, and Mr. Schwartz’s eyes remained fixed upon it as he said: “We can’t get in, and it’s time for you two to go back to the plane.”

It was still not quite dawn. The Hermitage looked like a nice big white box, but a little lonely and vacated still after a hundred years. We walked back to the car. Only after we had gotten in, and Mr. Schwartz had surprisingly shut the taxi door on us, did we realize he didn’t intend to come along.