Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"And you'll keep my horrid secret, won't you?"

"If you knew how complimented I feel, you'd know I would die several highly disagreeable deaths before I'd let you think me unworthy of your confidence."

"That's very sweet," Lucinda considered with mischievous gravity. "And I am most appreciative. But if you will persist in playing on my susceptibilities so ardently, Mr. Summerlad, I'll have to go to bed."

"Please sit still: I'll be good."

"No, but seriously," Lucinda insisted, rising: "it is late, and I want to wake up early, I don't want to miss anything of this wonderful country."

"You won't see anything in the morning but desert, the edge of the Mojave."

"But we've been in the desert all afternoon and I adore it."

"Oh, these Arizona plains! they're not real desert; they're just letting on; give them a few drinks and they'll start a riot – of vegetation. But the Mojave's sure-enough he-desert: sand and sun, cactus and alkali. I'm much more interesting, I'm so human."

"Yes: I've noticed. Masculine human. But, you see, a desert's a novelty. I really must go…"

She went to sleep under two blankets, but before day-break a sudden rise in temperature woke her up.

The train was at a standstill. Lucinda put up the window-shade to see, all dim in lilac twilight, a brick platform, a building of Spanish type, a signboard proclaiming one enigmatic word: NEEDLES.

Sharp jolts in series ran through the linked cars, a trainman beneath the window performed cryptic calisthenics with a lantern, one unseen uttered a prolonged, heart-rending howl, couplings clanked, the train gathered way.

As it toiled with stertorous pantings on up-grades seemingly interminable, the night grew cool again but by no means so cold as at bedtime. The outposts of Winter had been passed. The porter who tidied up the drawing-room in the morning opened a window and adjusted a cinder-screen: the breath of the desert was warm but deliciously sweet. Outside, heat-devils jigged above a blasted waste that was, as Lucinda viewed it, weirdly beautiful. The noontide air at Barstow had all the fever of a windless day of August in the East. Within the riven scarps of the Cajon Pass it was hotter still. A long, swift down-swoop toward the Pacific brought them by mid-afternoon to San Bernardino, set in emerald, where people lolled about the platform in white flannels and airy organdies.

The panorama of sylvan loveliness, all green and gold, commanded by the windows from San Bernardino onward, prepared for a Los Angeles widely unlike the city of Lucinda's first confused impressions, for something Arcadian and spacious instead of a school of sky-scrapers that might have been transported en masse from almost any thriving commercial centre of the North Atlantic seaboard. She was sensible of dull resentment as Summerlad's car – an open one but of overpowering bigness and staggering in its colour-scheme of yellow and black with silver trimmings – progressed in majesty through streets where monstrous trolleys ground and clanged, motor vehicles plodded, champing at the bits, in solid column formation, and singularly shabby multitudes drifted listlessly between towering white marble walls.

Only train-weariness and the glad prospect of a tub bath earned the Hotel Alexandria forgivenness for its sin of ostentation in pretending to stand at Broadway and Forty-second street, New York.

That sense of having been somehow swindled was, if anything, stronger in consequence of an expedition afoot with Fanny after breakfast, in the course of which the two women explored the shopping and business district adjacent to the hotel. The imaginations responsible for the plan and building of the city had suffered from that deadly blight of imitativeness which afflicts the American mentality all the land over, restricting every form of emulation to charted channels, with the result that ambition seldom seeks its outlet in expression of individuality but as a rule in the belittling of another's achievement through simple exaggeration of its bulk and lines, in being not distinctive but only bigger, showier, and more blatant.

Having lunched with Fanny (Lontaine was busy, it was understood, promoting his indefinite but extensive motion-picture interests) Lucinda returned to rooms which Summerlad had caused to be transformed in her absence into the likeness of a fashionable florist and fruiterer's shop; and while she was trying to decide whether to move half the lot or herself out into the hall, the telephone rang and a strange voice announced that Mr. Summerlad's chauffeur was speaking and Mr. Summerlad's car was at the door and likewise at the disposition of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Lontaine for the afternoon.

"Ought we?" Lucinda doubted with a little grimace.

"Why not?" Fanny asked.

"It seems just a bit… Oh, I don't know. I presume it would be ungracious to question Californian hospitality."

"Copy-Californian," Fanny corrected. "Chances are you'll find Summerlad's a native son of Omaha or some point East. Does it matter? He means well, and we want to see Los Angeles."

"But that car!"

"It is rather a circus-wagon; but judging by what we've seen in the streets today, the way to make oneself conspicuous here is to sport a car of gaudy black or screaming navy blue. In the racy idiom of the Golden West – let's go."

They went. In ten minutes Los Angeles of the sky-scrapers was forgotten. For three hours league after league of garden-land, groves, plantations, ocean beach, bare brown hills, verdant valleys wide as an Eastern county, all bathed in sunlight of peculiar brilliance and steadiness falling through crystalline air from a sky innocent of cloud, passed in review before beauty-stricken eyes.

In the end the car turned without warning off a main-travelled highway, swept the bluestone drive of what might well have been parked private grounds, and stopped before the imposing, columned portico of an old Colonial mansion.

The chauffeur turned back a friendly, grinning face. "This is where Mr. Summerlad works," he announced – "the Zinn Studios."

"Studios!"

"Yes, ma'm – where they make the movin'-pictures."

Lucinda stared unbelievingly at the building, finding it hardly possible to reconcile such mellow beauty of scheme and proportion, so harmonious with the spacious lawns and massed foliage of its setting, with memories of those grubby, grimy, back-street premises tenanted by the Culp studios in New York.

A screen-door beneath the portico opened, Mr. Summerlad emerged, a shape of slender elegance in Shantung silk, and ran impetuously down to the car. With more deliberation Lontaine appeared and waited.

"Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lontaine: I hope you'll forgive me for telling Tom to stop in here instead of taking you back to the hotel. Lontaine's here, and we've planned a little surprise, dinner at my place out in Beverly Hills, just the four of us. You won't say no and spoil everything? That's splendid! But it's early, and perhaps you'd like a look around a regular movie factory first…"

Conducting them through the building by way of a panelled entrance hall, Summerlad explained that the stages were temporarily idle, due to the fact that photography on two productions in process had recently been finished and their casts disbanded, only the directors and their staffs remaining to cut and title the films; while the production in which Summerlad was to play the lead was as yet not ready for the cameras.

The working premises lay behind the administration building. But here again Lucinda noted few points of close resemblance to the Culp studios. A field several acres in extent, about half in turf, was surrounded by a sizeable village of glass-roofed stages and structures housing the technical and mechanical departments – a laboratory, a costumier's, property, carpenter and scene-painting shops, directors' offices, dressing, projection and cutting-rooms, a garage, sheds to shelter motor-cars and trucks by the score, stables, a small menagerie, a huge tank for "water stuff," a monolithic fire-proof vault of cement for the storage of film.

Due in great measure to temporary suspension of active camera-work, the place seemed very peaceful and pervaded by an atmosphere of orderliness and efficiency. There were no actors wasting time about the grounds, no sets occupied the huge enclosed stages, the men at work in the several departments seemed all to be busy.

"Well, Mrs. Lee: what do you think of a California studio? Not much like what you've seen back East, eh?"

Lucinda shook her head, and smiled. "I am enchanted with this country," she said; "if what I've seen of it this afternoon is any criterion, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to go away from…"

"You haven't begun to see it yet." Summerlad declared. "Wait till we've had a few motor trips."

"As for your studio, it is most marvellous to me. If they're all like this, I don't wonder people are mad to act in motion-pictures. If Mr. Culp had promised me anything like this, I don't believe I should have had the courage to refuse."

"It's not too late to change your mind, Mrs. Lee," Lontaine suggested. "In fact, if I thought there was any hope you would, I'd go down on my knees to you. Oh, not to act for Culp, but for me; or rather, for yourself, as the head and the star of your own company. No: I'm serious. I've been talking with several people today who want me to try producing out here. I can get unlimited capital to back me. This country today is crying for better pictures – and I know how to make them. I can bring to the American cinema the one thing it needs, a thorough knowledge of European methods. Only one thing makes me hesitate, the lack of a suitable star. All the people of real ability seem to be tied up under long-term contracts. I may lose months looking for the right actress unless you – "

"Why pick on me?" Lucinda laughed. "I'm not even an actress."

"Ah! you forgot I've seen you prove on the screen what you can do. You don't know yourself, Mrs. Lee. There isn't a woman in the country can touch you, if you'll take your ability seriously. You need only two things to make you great, a good director, and self-confidence."

"Aren't you running a great risk, making such flattering overtures to an untried, unknown amateur?"

"Don't worry about me. If I had any hope of being able to persuade you to try it on, I'd tell you to name your own terms, and shoulder the risk without a murmur."

Lontaine's earnestness was so real that one might no longer meet his arguments with levity. There was a strained look of anxiety in the blue eyes, a restrained passion of pleading in the ordinarily languid accents. Or else Lucinda fancied these things.

But a sidelong glance showed that Fanny, too, was apparently hanging between hope and fear…

And a thought revived that had once or twice before presented itself, a suspicion that all was not as well as one might wish with the state of the Lontaine fortunes, strengthening the surmise that Lucinda's decision meant more to them both than Lontaine had confessed.

Still one hesitated to believe…

"But you can't be serious! Do you really want me to become a movie actress under your management?"

"You can't think of anything I wouldn't do to persuade you."

"Why not, Mrs. Lee?" Summerlad urged. "It would be great fun for you, and you can't fail, you can't lose anything. If you only knew how inferior most stars are to you in every way…"