Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"Go ahead, Linda, by all means divorce me if your heart's set on it" – one could almost hear him say it – "but don't tell me you're doing it just to marry a man who paints his nose for a living."

Somehow one got scant comfort of the retort obvious, that if Lynn did paint his nose he at least did it with nothing more harmful than paint.

At all costs, then, she must avoid the risk of telling Bel what she intended, and keep the tone of the impending scene in tune with the dignity which she had thus far been successful in maintaining, be firm but cool, and give him clearly to understand it was hopeless his attempting to make whole again that sacred vessel which his impious hands had shattered.

Maintained upon such a plane that scene must have been both beautiful and conclusive. And no doubt it would have been so but for one circumstance: Bel not only failed to call on Lucinda at the time appointed but failed even to send word of apology or explanation. An affront whose realization transmuted nobility of spirit into resentment most humanly rancorous.

Lucinda had sacrificed the evening to sense of duty; a true sacrifice, for Lynn was leaving early next morning to spend a fortnight with his company in an Oregon logging camp. So this would have been their last evening together for fourteen livelong days, if Lucinda hadn't promised it to Bellamy, and if Summerlad hadn't mournfully agreed (measurably to Lucinda's disappointment in him) that she could not afford to dishonour her promise. Surely their secret happiness was enough to compensate for that much self-denial, especially when it meant the last of Bellamy…

Losing patience after hours of waiting, Lucinda called the Alexandria on the telephone, and was informed that Mr. Druce had "checked out" early in the morning, saying nothing of an intention to return.

Mystified even more than angry, Lucinda went to bed, but lay wakeful a long time trying to fathom the enigma of such conduct in one whose need of her had brought him all the way across America to beg that very audience which had been granted only to be coolly ignored. The readiest explanation, likewise at first blush the likeliest, was none the less at odds with the premeditation to be read in Bel's leaving his hotel before noon, which wasn't the action of a man whom drink had made forgetful, but rather that of one who repented his haste in suing for something which sober second-thought had satisfied him he didn't really want.

How funny, if so! How very human!

Lucinda contributed her first smile since nightfall to the darkness of her bedchamber.

But having smiled, she frowned involuntarily…

No note came from Bellamy the next morning, and nothing transpired in the course of the next several weeks to afford any clue to the riddle; with the upshot that Lucinda thought about her husband a great deal more than she wanted to or had at any time since leaving Chicago. Curiosity being piqued no less than vanity, though she kept assuring herself it was a matter of indifference to her what Bel did or didn't nowadays, invariably the consideration followed that, all the same, it was strange, it wasn't like Bel to treat any woman so rudely.

She would, in those days, have been glad and grateful for some interest so absorbing as to relegate this vexing question to the realm of the immaterial, where rightly it belonged. But, with Summerlad away, nothing much happened with enervating regularity, the most interesting hours Lucinda knew were those spent in her rooms waiting for Lynn to call up on the long distance telephone. This he did every evening, and though she was thus daily provided with exhilarating moments, those that followed always seemed desperately the duller. The truth was, lacking the sense of danger, of flirting with fire, that was intrinsic in their love-making, lacking the sense of doing something that she oughtn't, calmly flouting the rigid code of her caste and having nothing to pay, Lucinda was beginning to find her environment a trifle tiresome. Say what one would, there was a certain cloying sameness about it all.

Somebody once said in her hearing that there wasn't any weather in Southern California but only climate. And it was true that at times the wonder and beauty of everlasting sunlight seemed a poor offset to its monotony; so that Lucinda would sometimes find herself grown a little weary of the sky's dense, inexpressive, day-long blue; and even its nightly extravagance of stars now and again impressed her as being too persistently spectacular, an ostentation on the part of Nature as tasteless as many jewels plastered on a woman's pretty bosom. One rather wanted to recommend the chiffon of clouds…

Then, too, one grew acquainted with certain, definite limitations restricting the amount of amusement to be had of taking active or passive part in the simple, rowdy pleasures of the motion-picture peerage. When one had several times attended the festivities these staged in the public resorts most in favour or in their private homes, one was apt to feel moderately surfeited with jazz of all sorts, mental and moral as well as musical, and a society made up in the main of men who thought it too much trouble to dress and women who as a matter of habit airily consummated the contradiction of being at one and the same time under and over-dressed. And once the novelty of learning to speak a strange tongue had worn off, no great amount of intellectual nourishment was to be extracted of studio shop-talk, which commonly was concerned in the ratio of one to ten with the business of making motion-pictures and with the private, broadly speaking, lives of the people who were making them, lives seldom held worth the discussing when their conduct was decorous.

Though personal liberty of action and freedom of speech be part of the inalienable heritage of the American people, it was the sum of Lucinda's observation that in the studios both were practised to the point of abandon. She considered herself the most liberal-minded of women, the life she had led till now had left her few illusions, she had even been known to enunciate an aphorism in the sense that hypocrisy is a lubricant essential to the mechanism of society: here, however, she remarked, such lubrication was so generally dispensed with that oftentimes the bearings screeched to Heaven.

But Heaven made no sign, and the Hollywood of active and retired tradespeople, to which the studios had brought prosperity beyond its maddest dreams, stuffed its ears and made believe there was nothing to hear.

As for the studios, busy, complacent, and well-content to be spared the troublesome necessity of pretending to be better than they were, they forgot (if, indeed, they ever stopped to think) that they did not constitute the whole of the community, and chuckled openly over a saying that ran their rounds that season, the mot of one of their own wits:

"Are you married? Or do you live in Hollywood?"

XXIX

Lucinda had by now become sufficiently conversant with the ways of directors to hear without much surprise – if with a little sinking of her lonely heart – the news which Summerlad had to communicate on the tenth day of his absence, when he telephoned that Jacques was threatening to find a fortnight too little for the work that had taken the company away from Los Angeles.

And the next day, when she paid the studio the perfunctory call of routine – to learn, as usual, that Barry Nolan had as yet sent no word concerning the date when he expected to begin directing for Linda Lee Inc. – Lucinda saw, as she left her car in front of the administration building, the owner of the premises lounging against one of the fluted columns of the portico and mumbling an unlighted cigar, and got from him a moody nod instead of the beaming salutation he had taught her to expect.

Himself a monstrously homely man, short, stout and swart, Zinn had an alert eye for feminine good looks, which had never before neglected to give Lucinda to understand that it was on her and humid with approbation.

By birth a Russian Jew, offspring of immigrants from Odessa, Isadore Zinn had worked his way into the producing business, as the saying ran, through its backdoor; that is to say, from the exhibitors' side. Indefatigable industry and appetite for hardship coupled with quenchless greed and a complete absence of scruples and moral sense, had promoted him from the office of usher in a "nickelodeon" of the cinema's early days successively to be the proprietor of the enterprise, organizer of a chain of motion-picture theatres, and president of a league of exhibitors, which last had eventually pooled its resources and gone into the business of producing as well as that of showing pictures. The money of this league had built what were today the Zinn Studios; just how this property had come to pass into Zinn's sole possession was a matter of secret history concerning which there were many rumours, all unsavory. Zinn was reputed by his loving employees to set no more store by a dollar than by an eye-tooth or an only child.

On leaving, half an hour later, Lucinda found the man in the same spot and pose. Apparently he had not moved a muscle in that interval. She paused to ask why, and was frankly told.

"I'm figuring on killing a director, Miss Lee, and wondering if maybe I couldn't get away with it. I could all right, if you only could believe all you hear. You ask any of them fellers in there" – Zinn jerked his head toward the building behind him – "takes my good money and calls me Mister Zinn – and they'll tell you I get away with murder every day or worse." He sighed dismally. "If they was any truth in that, I'd be a happy kike and a lot of directors' wives wouldn't have nothing on their minds no more, only their hair. The way I am today, the first one I'd take a load off her intellect would be Mrs. Jacques."

"I didn't know Mr. Jacques was married."

"Maybe he ain't right now, it's hard to tell. You take actors and directors, they're all the same, you never know when they ain't married or how long they been that way. The way it seems to me, they get married off and on just to see what difference it will make if any. 'Most everybody you know's got a loose wife or husband kicking around somewhere this side the Cajon Pass. The only way you can keep track of them is don't try."

"It must be frightfully embarrassing at times…"

"Ah, they don't mind! I had one little feller working for me, playing leads in two-reel comedies, his director was his first wife's second husband, and the little lady played opposite him was his second wife once removed. They got along fine s'long's they was on the lot, but outside the studio they wouldn't speak, only bark when they passed."

"But you haven't told me what Mr. Jacques has been doing…"

"Oh, him – ! I got a wire from him just now, says he's going to have to keep the Summerlad outfit up in that logging camp maybe another couple weeks. Joe could of shot all the scenes he had to shoot up there in a week if he'd of went at it the right way; so I give him two weeks, and now he wants four. And I don't dare give him the razz for fear he'll make it six weeks or quit."

"But if you aren't satisfied, surely you can find another director."

"Sure I can. And the first thing he'll do is run all the rushes in the projection-room and tell me they're rotten and got to be retook the way he sees it. And then he'll rewrite the continuity and, just to show me what a low piker Jacques was, he'll stick in a lot of new stuff that'll cost maybe another hundred thousand dollars."

"I don't understand," Lucinda objected. "Why should Mr. Jacques deliberately waste time on a production?"

"He's getting his two thousand a week, ain't he? And if he makes this picture cost less than the last one Summerlad done, how's he going to keep his tail up with the other dogs, next time the hooch hounds meets down to Santa Monica? Not only that, if he should ever get a rep for making pictures quick and cheap, the only jobs he'll be offered will mean honest-to-God work."

"But, Mr. Zinn: if that's the usual director's attitude toward his job, I should think you would do as we're doing with Mr. Nolan, pay each a fixed sum for every production he makes."

Zinn drew down the corners of his mouth in sour pity for Lucinda's innocence. "Twenty-five thousand a picture's what Nolan's going to drag down, ain't it? When a director gets that class, he's doing you a favour to make pictures for you, to start off with; and then he spreads himself to spend more coin more ways than any other director ever thought of, just to show you he's the big-money boy. A director don't think big means anything without a dollar-mark parked in front of it; and the producer's the poor sap that puts up the dollar-mark every time. They's only one way a producer can beat a director, the way it is today, and that's quit the fillum business cold."

"I presume that's what you'll do, if the directors persist in making it impossible for you to make any money."

A twinkle kindled in the beady eyes, a rougishly confidential grin formed on the fleshy features. "Now, listen, Miss Lee: I never told you I wasn't making money, did I? It's the jack directors waste on me I'm kicking about. Any time things get so bad you can't give one of them megaphone nurses his head and still get your production cost back and something over, I got it all framed so I can ease out and never be missed."

And when Lucinda had obliged by voicing a polite doubt that such a thing as this could ever come to pass, Zinn concluded with grim humour: "I got everything all set to sell the studio to the county for an insane asylum; then nobody in Hollywood won't never know the difference."

Running true to the form thus forecast, Jacques kept the Summerlad company away so long that its return found the first Linda Lee production in full swing, with Barry Nolan in command, Lucinda playing the supple puppet of his whim from sun to sun, Fanny demurely walking through the feminine part of second importance, and Lontaine functioning at the peak of his capacity as executive genius of the organization and showing the strain of it all in his prominent blue eyes.

Why it should be so hard on him nobody seemed to know and Lontaine was too busy to explain; while Lucinda, in the prepossession of her anxiety to give a good account of herself before the camera, carelessly accepted that prodigious display of activity, that mien of unremitting abstraction, as phenomena doubtless common to men of affairs, and never paused to wonder why Lontaine need be so fretted and fretful when everything was now in the hands of Nolan and his assistants, who did pretty much as they pleased anyway, as a rule consulting Lontaine if at all only after acting on their own initiative and leaving to his office merely the routine of financial matters.

Nevertheless Lontaine was ever the first of the Linda Lee forces to show up at the studio in the morning, the last to leave it at night, and between whiles kept incessantly on the go: trotting from his desk to the stage to give Nolan the benefit of advice which was invariably attended to with much patience and disregarded with more promptitude as soon as its source turned his back; to the laboratory to run a wise eye over negative newly developed as it came dripping from the vats to be stretched to dry upon huge revolving drums; to the studio of the technical director, to badger that competent and long-suffering gentleman about sets and their dressing; to Zinn's sanctum overlooking the "lot," where that old-timer sat spying out on the comings and goings of his employees and spinning his endless schemes of avarice, but ever ready to lend an ear and give cunning counsel to a tenant who paid his rent on the nail; to the projection-rooms to view the rushes; back to the stage to flatter Lucinda, felicitate Nolan, and buttonhole subordinate players for earnest conferences apart concerning their performances – this last a habit which, since it afforded the actors a chance to talk about themselves, earned Lontaine the loving gratitude of all hands, barring the directorial staff whose job it was to undo all that he did, were it well done or ill, for the sake of morale and to preserve unimpaired the precious prestige of Barry Nolan.

At other times members of the cast loafing about the lot while they waited to be called to work on the stage, would observe the president of Linda Lee Inc., at the window of his tiny office in the administration building, brooding portentously over documents of legal aspect, or with fine flourishes of the fountain-pen affixing his hand to those cheques which, issuing forth in a steady stream, kept the treasury always at low ebb no matter how often or how generously Lucinda might replenish it.

Neither did the silver-and-blue car know overmuch rest. In view of the man's ubiquity in the studio, it was surprising how often Lontaine was to be seen speeding down Sunset Boulevard, bound for the business centre of Los Angeles, to other studios for mysterious conferences with local somebodies who had no known interest in the destinies of Linda Lee Inc., or to objectives whose nature remained a close secret between Lontaine, his chauffeur, and his God.

To all these picturesque symptoms of hustle and bounce, so little in character with the Briton of tradition, his wife played silent but attentive audience; though oftentimes her pretty eyes would light up with an unspoken comment too pungent to be wasted and, discreetly questing a sympathetic confidant would find it without fail in Barry Nolan, who learned to watch for that look whenever one of Lontaine's antics made a more than everyday appeal to his sense of humour.

Irish both by descent and profession, Nolan had at least that sense conspicuously developed. What others he possessed of which as much might be asserted, was a question which came to occupy many of Lucinda's spare moments. She was not at all disposed to be hypercritical, in the beginning, she had yet to cultivate conceit in her abilities as an actress, she knew that she knew little more than nothing about the manufacture of motion-pictures; and Summerlad had so highly recommended Nolan she inclined to suspect there must be something radically wrong with her judgment. With all this, she couldn't pretend to account for Nolan's high place in the hierarchy of the cinema, unless a sprightly and affectionate disposition, a fetching grin, infectious verve, impudence without end, and a distinctly indicated vein of genius at crap-shooting, summed up the essential qualifications of a director who pretended to earn a wage of twenty-five thousand dollars per production. Certainly nothing that Nolan was contributing to this present picture, in the way of action, business, sense of dramatic proportion and feeling for pictorial values, appealed as in any way inspired – except occasionally by a retentive memory.

True that common usage in methods of production, working together with such special circumstances as Lucinda's inexperience and the absence of any fixed plan of plot development other than in the omniscience of Barry Nolan, made it anything but easy to judge the man fairly by the record of his work from day to day.

In the continuity which Nolan concocted to supplant that prepared by Zinn's staff writer – as in every proper continuity – each scene had been placed in its right sequence, where anybody uninstructed in the way of a director with a picture might reasonably look to see it appear in the completed photoplay. But as soon as the typist had transcribed Nolan's dictation, the new continuity was turned over to his assistants to be dismembered and rebuilt with its scenes arranged as they were to be photographed, by groups, without respect to chronological sequence.

Obviously it would be stupid (as Lucinda was quick to appreciate) to take the scenes as laid out in the continuity; for example, to photograph Scene 1 in a studio set, transport the company ten miles to photograph Scene 2 on, say, an ocean beach, and jump back to the studio to take Scene 3 on the same set as used for Scene 1. Consequently all scenes indicated for each particular set were shot seriatim; after which the set would be promptly demolished, to clear the stage for the erection of another.