The Last Tycoon

He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, though, and presently he was hip deep in the water, fishing for them with a pole and succeeding only in spinning it in a dizzy circle. Help arrived, and the impression quickly got around that one of them was very pretty, and then that they were people of importance. But they were just strays, and Robby waited disgustedly to give them hell while the thing was brought finally into control and beached.

“Put that head back!” he called up to them. “You think it’s a souvenir?”

One of the women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol, and Robby caught and set her on solid ground; the other one hesitated and then followed. Robby turned to Stahr for judgment.

“What’ll we do with them, chief?”

Stahr did not answer. Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight, the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead; the smile lingered, changed a little according to pattern; the lips parted—the same. An awful fear went over him, and he wanted to cry aloud. Back from the still sour room, the muffled glide of the limousine hearse, the falling concealing flowers, from out there in the dark—here now warm and glowing. The river passed him in a rush, the great spotlights swooped and blinked—and then he heard another voice speak that was not Minna’s voice.

“We’re sorry,” said the voice. “We followed a truck in through a gate.”

A little crowd had gathered—electricians, grips, truckers, and Robby began to nip at them like a sheep dog.

“… get the big pumps on the tanks on Stage 4 … put a cable around this head … raft it up on a couple of two by fours … get the water out of the jungle first, for Christ’s sake … that big ‘A’ pipe, lay it down … all that stuff is plastic …”

Stahr stood watching the two women as they threaded their way after a policeman toward an exit gate. Then he took a tentative step to see if the weakness had gone out of his knees. A loud tractor came bumping through the slush, and men began streaming by him—every second one glancing at him, smiling, speaking: “Hello, Monroe. … Hello, Mr. Stahr. … wet night, Mr. Stahr … Monroe … Monroe … Stahr … Stahr … Stahr.”

He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking, I suppose, a little like the Emperor and the Old Guard. There is no world so but it has its heroes, and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time—through the beginnings and the great upset, when sound came, and the three years of depression, he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyalties were trembling now, there were clay feet everywhere; but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went by.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_1f2a0ed2-c290-5a58-9807-01f15bee8d9a)

Between the night I got back and the quake, I’d made many observations.

About Father, for example. I loved Father—in a sort of irregular graph with many low swoops—but I began to see that his strong will didn’t fill him out as a passable man. Most of what he accomplished boiled down to shrewd. He had acquired with luck and shrewdness a quarter interest in a booming circus—together with young Stahr. That was his life’s effort—all the rest was an instinct to hang on. Of course, he talked that double talk to Wall Street about how mysterious it was to make a picture, but Father didn’t know the ABCs of dubbing or even cutting. Nor had he learned much about the feel of America as a bar boy in Ballyhegan, nor did he have any more than a drummer’s sense of a story. On the other hand, he didn’t have concealed paresis like—; he came to the studio before noon, and, with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle, it was hard to put anything over on him.

Stahr had been his luck—and Stahr was something else again. He was a marker in industry like Edison and Lumière and Griffith and Chaplin. He led pictures way up past the range and power of the theatre, reaching a sort of golden age, before the censorship.

Proof of his leadership was the spying that went on around him—not just for inside information or patented process secrets—but spying on his scent for a trend in taste, his guess as to how things were going to be. Too much of his vitality was taken by the mere parrying of these attempts. It made his work secret in part, often devious, slow—and hard to describe as the plans of a general, where the psychological factors become too tenuous and we end by merely adding up the successes and failures. But I have determined to give you a glimpse of him functioning, which is my excuse for what follows. It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on A Producer’s Day and partly from my imagination. More often I have blocked in the ordinary events myself, while the stranger ones are true.

In the early morning after the flood, a man walked up to the outside balcony of the Administration Building. He lingered there some time, according to an eyewitness, then mounted to the iron railing and dove head first to the pavement below. Breakage—one arm.

Miss Doolan, Stahr’s secretary, told him about it when he buzzed for her at nine. He had slept in his office without hearing the small commotion.

“Pete Zavras!” Stahr exclaimed, “—the camera man?”

“They took him to a doctor’s office. It won’t be in the paper.”

“Hell of a thing,” he said. “I knew he’d gone to pot—but I don’t know why. He was all right when we used him two years ago—why should he come here? How did he get in?”

“He bluffed it with his old studio pass,” said Catherine Doolan. She was a dry hawk, the wife of an assistant director. “Perhaps the quake had something to do with it.”

“He was the best camera man in town,” Stahr said. When he had heard of the hundreds dead at Long Beach, he was still haunted by the abortive suicide at dawn. He told Catherine Doolan to trace the matter down.

The first dictograph messages blew in through the warm morning. While he shaved and had coffee, he talked and listened. Robby had left a message: “If Mr. Stahr wants me tell him to hell with it I’m in bed.” An actor was sick or thought so; the Governor of California was bringing a party out; a supervisor had beaten up his wife for the prints and must be “reduced to a writer”—these three affairs were Father’s job—unless the actor was under personal contract to Stahr. There was early snow on a location in Canada with the company already there—Stahr raced over the possibilities of salvage, reviewing the story of the picture. Nothing. Stahr called Catherine Doolan.

“I want to speak to the cop who put two women off the back lot last night. I think his name’s Malone.”

“Yes, Mr. Stahr. I’ve got Joe Wyman—about the trousers.”

“Hello, Joe,” said Stahr. “Listen—two people at the sneak preview complained that Morgan’s fly was open for half the picture … of course they’re exaggerating, but even if it’s only ten feet … no, we can’t find the people, but I want that picture run over and over until you find that footage. Get a lot of people in the projection room—somebody’ll spot it.”

Tout passe.—L’art robuste

Seul a l’éternité.

“And there’s the Prince from Denmark,” said Catherine Doolan. “He’s very handsome.” She was impelled to add pointlessly, “—for a tall man.”

“Thanks,” Stahr said. “Thank you, Catherine, I appreciate it that I am now the handsomest small man on the lot. Send the Prince out on the sets and tell him we’ll lunch at one.”

“And Mr. George Boxley—looking very angry in a British way.”

“I’ll see him for ten minutes.”

As she went out, he asked: “Did Robby phone in?”

“No.”

“Call sound, and if he’s been heard from, call him and ask him this. Ask him this—did he hear that woman’s name last night? Either of those women. Or anything so they could be traced.”

“Anything else?”

“No, but tell him it’s important while he still remembers. What were they? I mean what kind of people—ask him that, too. I mean were they—”

She waited, scratching his words on her pad without looking.

“—oh, were they—questionable? Were they theatrical? Never mind—skip that. Just ask if he knows how they can be traced.”

The policeman, Malone, had known nothing. Two dames, and he had hustled ’em, you betcha. One of them was sore. Which one? One of them. They had a car, a Chevy—he thought of taking the license. Was it—the good looker who was sore? It was one of them.

Not which one—he had noticed nothing. Even on the lot here Minna was forgotten. In three years. So much for that, then.

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it—finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness—sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there—toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously. “Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”

The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.

“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.

“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent, but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it—they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”

“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.

“I have. I sent you some.”

“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”