Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"Then – you will find the capital yourself, Mrs. Druce?"

"I think I can manage it without too much trouble."

Lontaine sighed quietly and relaxed. The contented glow of last night crept back into his eyes. He produced his cigarette-case, and began to smoke in luxurious puffs.

"Need there be any trouble?"

"I'm only wondering what Harford Willis will say." Lucinda laughed quietly. She could imagine the horror that would overspread the carven countenance of the gentleman of the old school when he learned that she meant to add the unpardonable solecism of play-acting to the heinous but after all fashionable estate of divorcée. "An old friend of my father's who looks after my estate," she explained to Lontaine's echo of the name. "He thinks I've disgraced myself as it is. When I tell him what more I mean to do, I'm sure he'll think I'm damned beyond redemption – socially, at all events."

"Need he know?"

"I'm afraid so. I don't believe I've got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on deposit altogether. You see, most of my income is reinvested promptly as it comes in, leaving only enough to meet my usual, everyday expenses."

"Surely you can fob him off with some excuse, Mrs. Druce." Lontaine was frowning at the carpet. "Of course, you understand, I'm only thinking of your peace of mind."

"I'll think it over. But whether he likes it or not, we'll go ahead as we've planned. And as for money to get started with, I'm sure I can put something over fifty thousand at your command."

"Famous!" Lontaine's brow cleared instantly. "I may call on you for a cheque in a day or two, for preliminary expenses, a retainer for our lawyers, incorporation fees, and the like, you know."

"That brings up a question that bothers me," Lucinda confessed. "You see, my cheques will be signed Lucinda Druce, and I don't like to risk my incognita as Linda Lee. I don't want Bellamy to find out where I am – and I don't want anybody else to know but the three of us – and Mr. Summerlad, I'd almost forgotten he knew – unless I really do succeed."

"Nothing to fret about," Lontaine declared. "Simply make your cheques payable to me. I'll open an account with a local bank in my name first, and transfer it to the account of Linda Lee Inc. as soon as we incorporate."

XXII

Lucinda at about this time began to know imitations of a psychic phenomenon working within herself for which she could find no better name than that of multiple personality. She was well aware that she didn't mean by this precisely what the term would have connoted to the mind of a psychoanalyst, but it was as near as she was able to come to a description of the disconcerting performances of the several Lucindas who seemed to tenant her by turns and be forever warring for the right to rule her daily actions and form her final destiny.

Figuring her soul in the likeness of a ship at sea, her sensations much resembled those which might conceivably inform a passenger watching half a dozen captains who were continually elbowing one another aside and taking command and steering each a quite new course of individual preference; with the inevitable result that a chart of any one day's run must have closely counterfeited the trackings of a fly that had crawled out of an ink-pot upon a fair white sheet of paper.

Most puzzling circumstance of all, the one true captain seemed to be standing apart throughout and observing the antics of these upstart understudies with considerable interest, not a little wonder, and some alarm.

Certain it was that she had ceased to be the single-minded and straightforward young woman she had been accustomed to think herself, a creature moulded in an uncompromising cliché of caste and moving through life upon lines definitely laid down, thinking only the thoughts, uttering only the formulæ, describing only the motions, experiencing only the sentiments and sensations considered suitable to one of her condition.

One act of mutiny had made an end to that one's reign and left an empty throne to be contested by this odd crew of usurpers, who were so many and so various, and in general so vaguely defined, that they defied cataloguing; though a few there were who by virtue of pronounced idiosyncrasy came to be recognized familiars.

There was one clear of vision, unillusioned even unto cynicism, but honourable, straight-spoken and fair-dealing, at once proud and unpretending, who was mostly in evidence in her hours of social life with the Lontaines, as distinguished from the time she spent with them in the way of business. This was Mrs. Bellamy Druce of her equivocal phase, who had ceased to be a wife and had yet to become unwedded: a woman worldly-wise and a trifle weary, but warm of heart, tolerant, and companionable.

Then there was Linda Lee, the rather excited and ambitious young thing who was all the while flying hither and yon in motor-cars, making curious acquaintances by the score, simulating an intelligent interest in affairs, legal matters, comparative merits of different studio accommodations, cost of equipment, salaries of employees, all those questions upon which Lontaine did her the honour of consulting her, knowing full well that she was fully satisfied as to his competence and incredulous of her own, and would faithfully endorse any course he might take or recommend. The first function of Miss Lee's office in the scheme was apparently that of drawing cheques. She led a busy life… It was also anything but an uninteresting one, though Miss Lee often wondered what it was all about and how she had come to be in it and sometimes felt that she was no better than a poor impostor and doomed in due course to be disgracefully shown up.

Another was a rare, shy visitant, never viewed by mortal eyes, who held dominion only in the dead hours of these nights when Lucinda lay wakeful and lonely, feeling lost without that which for so long had seemed an essential part of life, Bel's love and the dearness of him. A pathetic spirit, prone to tears and sighs and bitter self-reproachings. But when morning came, this one had always retreated to the outermost marches of memory, where she lingered, looking back a little wistfully, a timid wraith with pleading eyes, tenuous and evanescent as the souvenir of some caress long perished.

Again one was aware of a Lucinda who, abhorring the vacuum of empty hours, committed the maddest extravagance and fairly ran amok in shops, buying right and left with a recklessness that soon made her unawares the axis of a gale of whispers; in this manner dissipating a minor fortune before her first month in Los Angeles had run out.

Lamentably there was a Lucinda who did not scruple to resort to the shabbiest shifts to compass her ends; who, for example, without one qualm of conscience wrote to Harford Willis that, having been influenced to delay proceeding to Reno, she had fallen under the spell of Southern California, thought seriously of making it her future home, and would be glad if he would turn her certain investments into ready cash against the contingency of her deciding to purchase some princely property.

Last of all the major company of these lately apprehended Lucindas was the woman emotionally malcontent, newly fallen out of love but none the less still in love with love, who with eyes now amused, now indulgent, now shocked or startled, saw herself slowly and reluctantly but surely weakening to the wooing of Lynn Summerlad.

In a way the thing seemed fated. She knew nobody else, aside from the Lontaines. She was meeting people daily, of course, but not on terms to warrant any but the most commonplace civilities: men of affairs who reasonably reckoned her a pretty nonentity and concentrated on Lontaine as the person with money to spend; now and again some minor celebrity of the cinema colony, who, if male, would find some means to let her know she wouldn't be too ill treated should she succumb, or if female, would both envy and resent her inimitable chic, and at the same time put her in a place as a mere amateur who mustn't expect too much.

When she came to look back at those days, Lucinda saw herself as one always on the go with the Lontaines and Summerlad in his spectacular motor-car: pelting headlong for some objective leagues away, Riverside for luncheon at the Mission Inn, San Diego for a week-end, Santa Barbara for the drive along the magnificent Coastal Highway, or any other of two-score remote play-grounds; going out of an evening to one of the local restaurants, Victor Hugo's for its good food and urbane service, Marcelle's for dancing and its dumbfoundering scheme of decorations, Sunset Inn for the lark of it and the people one saw, the Ship for its wild traditions, or to some lost place in the labyrinth of strange streets below South Main, to which Summerlad alone knew the way, where one might get food purely exotic in character, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese; or (and this was part of the programme of nearly every night) braving the bill-of-fare at one or another of the city theatres or their arrogant rivals, the sumptuous cinemas.

In the course of that first month Lucinda sat through more photoplays than she had ever seen before, interested even when, as all too often, they were overweeningly ambitious of intention and sorry in execution; determined to read their riddle and learn what Summerlad and Lontaine were talking about when they argued in the jargon of the studios… But it was really the audiences that thronged these thundering temples of the silent drama that fascinated her, audiences of a texture inexplicably strange to Eastern eyes, like the street crowds from which they were drawn, so dense and constant that one was tempted to believe the people of Los Angeles never went home except to sleep.

Such torrents of motor vehicles brawled through the city channels, the only wonder was that anybody ever walked. Yet it was seldom Lucinda's fortune to view the sidewalks in the heart of town when they were not aswarm with moving masses of the most heterogeneous composition, shuffling, staring, oddly taciturn.

The great body of these seemed to be sober-sided souls in steady circumstances; a bourgeoisie smug and semi-shabby, ignorant of its past, heedless of its future, largely unconcerned with its present; self-dedicated to existences as uninteresting and useful as a cow's. Summerlad cursed it with a local aphorism to the sense that Los Angeles was governed by small-town people from the Middle West who had come to California each with one lung and one dollar and a grim determination to hang onto both to the bitter end.

Infiltrating this primary element was one alien to it but comprehending also figures that might have served for a pageant of North American history, figures many of them like old wood-cuts brought to life; red Indians, Down East Yankees, Mexicans, gaunt hillsmen from Kentucky and Tennessee, towering Texans, ranchmen from the plains, and folk in whose eyes shone the brooding abstraction of the desert; in the main ill-clothed and uncouth of gesture, hiding behind apathetic masks a certain awe and sense of awkwardness.

And then, like spume wind-torn from the crests of sullen seas, glittering with rainbow iridescence, a froth of creatures money-drunk and amusement-mad, drones lured to California by its fabled Winter climate, and an earth-born army audaciously experimenting with wings bestowed by the careless bounty of the cinema.

Against this picture of a ceaseless crush in the centre of the city, Lucinda set in contrast so sharp that it never lost its power to stir her wonder, a picture on every hand repeated off the main arteries of traffic in the radiating residential suburbs: an interminable street of broad-eaved white bungalows hugging the ground, each isolate in its unfenced plot of green, to each its vines, its flower beds, its stripling orange trees, and each and every one silent and in all seeming lifeless, cowering in the day-long glare of that vast and empty vault of blue, like a city of doll-houses which the children had outgrown…

XXIII

The incorporators of Linda Lee Inc. were not, however, long left dependent on motor-cars that plied for hire and the orange-and-black outrage on wheels which was everywhere known as "Lynn Summerlad's bus."

One of Lontaine's first acts as president of the fledgling organization was to pay out ten thousand dollars of its capital for a startling blue-and-silver car, the whim of an absent-minded motion-picture star whose sudden flitting from threats of arrest on charges of bigamy had left the car on the hands of its builders, to be picked up at what Lontaine called a bargain price. Lucinda was disposed to hold the cost immaterial, but demurred about accepting it for her personal use; and the consideration urged by Summerlad, that the more eye-arresting the colour scheme the better the advertisement for Linda Lee, failed to move her. So Lontaine felt constrained to use it himself; and Fanny demurely professed resignation, pointing out that in such a conveyance no husband would ever dare pursue any but paths of conspicuous rectitude.

For herself Lucinda eventually selected a modest landaulet of dark maroon; but it saw little service, save on shopping trips, till she began to use it for daily transportation to and from the studio.

Weeks slipped stealthily away, the rainy season waned, a Spring ensued like an Eastern Summer, with lusty vegetation, lengthening days of dry heat, and nights deliciously cooled by airs that swept through every sunless hour from the highlands to the sea; while delays on delays accumulated and still the day when "shooting" should begin lingered remotely down tomorrow's dim horizon.

Lontaine had leased studio space in the Zinn plant, which Summerlad recommended as the most modern and completely equipped on the Coast. For this the company was paying a weekly rental of fifteen hundred dollars. An expensive executive and technical staff, lacking only a director, was kicking heels of enforced idleness on full pay. A story had been selected, an old novel by a moderately popular author to which Zinn had in 1914 purchased all motion-picture rights outright for five hundred dollars and which he was now willing to part with for ten thousand as a special courtesy because he had taken such a mad fancy to Lontaine. A scenario writer, warranted by Zinn "the best in the business," had received five thousand for casting the story into continuity form, the labour of one whole week, and retired rejoicing to his hundred-and-fifty a week job in the Zinn scenario department. A reading of his bastard brain-child had persuaded Lucinda that continuity writing must be the mystery its adepts alleged; in fact, she couldn't understand the greater part of it, and what she did understand somewhat preyed upon her mind. But Lontaine seemed satisfied, Summerlad solaced her misgivings with the assurance that P. Potter Monahan simply couldn't write a poor continuity, and both agreed that Barry Nolan would know what to do to make it right when he got down to work on it.

Incidentally, he did: Nolan read it half-through, thoughtfully shied the manuscript out of a window, and dictated a continuity all his own, of which nobody but himself could make head or tail, and which at times in the course of its production seemed to puzzle even its perpetrator. But this Nolan was a resourceful lad and never hesitated to revise himself when at a loss: "That's out," he would inform his assistant; "we'll cover up the break with a subtitle. C'mon, let's shoot the close-ups;" or it might be: "Got another angle on that now. Instead of that scene where she casts him out of her life forever, I'm going to stick in some business Leslie Carter used to do in the last act of Zaza. We'll get round to that later. What's next?"

But these revelations of an unique technique, justly celebrated as such, were reserved for the indefinite future. Notwithstanding that he was under contract to Linda Lee Inc. to begin work as soon as he had finished the production he was then making, Lucinda was to be hounded through her professional début by another megaphone than Barry Nolan's.

In the engagement of that one resided the only reason for the delays. While negotiations for his services (at twice as much pay as he had ever received before) were in progress, Nolan confidently expected to be free in a fortnight. The day he signed the contract he admitted that he might possibly keep them waiting a trifle longer. It was two months later when he at length notified Lontaine that he was running up to San Francisco for a few days' rest and relaxation but would positively be "on the lot" and ready to go to work, in another week.

In the meantime Lucinda had moved to the Hollywood Hotel, the Lontaines to a furnished bungalow nearby, where they vainly pressed her to join them. She thought it wiser to decline.

"I'm far too fond of both of you to risk living with you," she explained. "It's no good deliberately placing ourselves in a position to get fed to the teeth with one another. Besides, I've got to get accustomed to shifting for myself, and it's high time I was learning to breathe in a proper motion-picture atmosphere."

This the Hollywood provided to admiration. Summerlad assured Lucinda, and on her own observation she could well believe, that at one stage or another of their careers almost every motion-picture player of consequence in the country must have registered at this hotel. Many continued to reside there, though no reason existed why they should not observe the custom of other happy holders of long-term contracts and move into homes of their own. Aside from such fixtures – and a non-professional element composed mainly of middle-aged folk with set incomes who had contracted the habit of spending their Winters and not much else in California – the hotel boasted a restless movement of birds of passage: stars of the legitimate stage brought on from New York to play in a single picture, lesser lights coming West at their own risk to solicit a "try-out;" playwrights and novelists with reputations in two continents declining to profit by the experience of innumerable predecessors, fatuously assuming that imagination, intelligence and honest workmanship had a dog's chance in the studios; directors enjoying their favorite pastime of hopping from Coast to Coast with everything paid; overlords of the cinema visiting the West Coast to look after their own or their rivals' fences and filch actors and directors from one another. These came and went by every trans-continental train. Remained the incurable addicts with yet another element, hardly less habitué but humbler, maintaining precarious residence in the hotel on meagre means, on remittances from home or God knew how (and, knowing, wept) hanging on desperately to hope of happier tomorrows, when they, too, would have their own cars call to take them to their daily toil, instead of trudging or trolleying from studio to studio in pursuit of the elusive day's work as an extra: a class largely feminine and insistently youthful.

With most of these Lucinda became acquainted by sight, with many she grew accustomed to exchange smiles and the time of day. They were a friendly lot, indomitably cheerful and brisk. If sheer joy of living didn't keep their eyes bright, belladonna did; their hand-painted smiles were unfailing; their slender, silken legs twinkled in vivacious by-play on veranda steps and in the public rooms; by every sign they were ever on the wing and jolly glad. Lucinda liked them all involuntarily, and wished them well; and when she came to know some of them better her heart ached for them.

This was inevitable. The most glacial reserve must have melted to the warmth of such gayly casual overtures. It was good business to know Miss Linda Lee, and they made it their business without undue delay. She had not been twenty-four hours a sister-guest before all these young things knew an astonishing lot about her that wasn't so, and a deal that was.

Lucinda was a raw tenderfoot who was going to finance her own company, a prominent stage favorite trying her luck under an assumed name, a Baltimore society beauty with the motion-picture bee in her bonnet, nobody at all except the dear friend of this or that nationally known man, who was paying to put her into pictures to get rid of her. It didn't matter who or what she was, more than what was irrefutably established: that she was Linda Lee, she had simply sloughs of coin, she was to star in her own productions, Barry Nolan had been engaged to direct her, Lynn Summerlad had gone nutty about her; all of which summed up to this, that Lucinda was in a position to utter words of power whose fruit might be days and days of work at ten or fifteen per – who knew? – perhaps the miracle of a steady job!

They made up to her saucily or shyly, according to the style they believed became them best, with assurance or with humility, with ostensible indifference, and some in open desperation. But on one point they were all agreed: they wanted work. Lucinda spoke about two or three of them to Lontaine, who laughed and advised her to recommend them to Barry Nolan's assistant, when that far day dawned on which the question of casting subordinate rôles would be in order. She spoke to Lynn Summerlad, and was rewarded with a worried frown, the first sign of care she had ever detected in him, together with some well-chosen thoughts on the dangers of contracting haphazard hotel acquaintanceships. Lucinda explained that she hadn't sought them, they had been practically forced upon her; she could see no merit in being rude and "upstage." Summerlad retorted darkly that one never could tell; the motion-picture colony harboured any number of queer birds; it wouldn't do for her of all women to pick up with a wrong one.

"First thing you know, they'll be trying to borrow money from you."

Lucinda was silent for want of a conscience that would sanction an indignant rejoinder.