Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

And in a sudden passion she turned and clung to him again, begging forgiveness for her suspicions and complaints. And Summerlad soothed her, patting gently the head that rested on his shoulder, smiling over it confidentially at the smiling midnight moon.

XXXIII

Lucinda dated from that Saturday the dawn of a fortnight when everything went wrong for her with such regularity that, in the end, the burden of its crosses grew too sore, the woman had been something more than merely mortal whose stores of fortitude and forbearance had not run low.

Naturally she blamed Bellamy…

In a way he asked for this, giving her too little chance to forget that the sunlight had been kind before his shadow fell again athwart her eyes. Now when skies were overcast and the wind had a tooth, Bel figured in the picture as a sort of stormy petrel, forever to be seen wheeling somewhere within the vague of the horizon.

Fare where she would on diversion bent, Lucinda seemed fated always to encounter Bel, and too often in the company of the Marquis girl; while at the studio it didn't matter much which way she turned, she could hardly avoid the sight of her husband buzzing about on the business of his new enterprise, and apparently finding it all great fun.

To one who recalled the dilettante Bellamy of New York days, there was matter enough for amazement in the gusto he had lately discovered for work that nothing required him to do, in the amount of real energy, enterprise and executive ability which he was contributing to this new amusement. For Lucinda refused to take seriously his infatuation with the motion-picture business; it wasn't real, she insisted to herself, it wouldn't last, he was putting it on just to plague her…

None the less he went to work with a will, and took little more than a week to assemble a producing unit, engage a company of players, and cause camera-work to be begun under the direction of one who, observed occasionally and from a distance, conveyed a refreshing impression of quiet authority.

Inasmuch as special sets could hardly have been designed and erected on such short notice, most of the company's first activities were staged away from the studio, "on location," and Lucinda knew nothing of them save through hearsay. Gossip had it, however, that Bellamy was employing no star to carry his initial production, but was rather making a "special" – the term which the motion-picture trade reads to mean a picture basing its claims solely on the strength of its story as interpreted by a well-balanced cast. Glimpses of Nelly Marquis in make-up, now and then, warranted the assumption that she had been given a part in the picture.

But their paths seldom crossed, notwithstanding that they were using the same studio, and when it did the young woman somehow always happened to be possessed by an abstraction too profound to permit of her seeing Lucinda.

Bel, on the other hand, was already ready with a smile and a friendly hail – "The top of the morning to you, Miss Lee! 'Tis hopeful I am the work, God bless it! is doing well" – or some similar absurdity; but never a hint that there had ever been any terms between them other than the most formal.

Gratitude for this much consideration rendered it no more easy to respond in the same spirit. Lucinda had never known anything more baffling than the absence of any justifiable grounds for objecting to Bel's presence in the studio. For if it were her privilege to seek to become a star of the cinema, it was equally his to launch out as a producer…

The daily disappointment that waited on efforts to find other quarters aggravated her sense of hardship. Lucinda learned to listen impatiently for the expressions of despair which unfailingly wound up Lontaine's reports: "If we've got to clear out of this – I don't know, Linda – I'm afraid it means either buy or build." She began to be afraid it did. Studio accommodations were reported never to have been so much in demand on the Coast. Every available stage was doing double duty, two companies crowding their activities wherever possible into a space formerly reserved for one. Neither knew they any rest by night, when belated souls would see the great roofs of glass livid with the incandescence of Cooper-Hewitt tubes, burning like vast green opals against the dense blue-black of early morning skies.

The tidal wave of the cinema craze that in those years swept the world was rearing its golden crest to its giddiest height; and the people of the studios rode in glee where the aureate spindrift blew, reckless of the law that every wave that lifts must fall, too drunk with money, altitude and speed to know that already, beneath their very feet, the crest was curving in upon itself, the fanged rocks were waiting.

Zinn, wily campaigner that he was by instinct and training, shrewd reader of signs and portents illegible to the general, foresaw the coming débâcle and – when he had made every provision against being overwhelmed in it – assumed in private the prophet's mantle.

"Been a good game while it lasted," he observed to Lucinda one day, "but it's on its way now, all right. I was reading a piece in the paper last night, all about how California seen three big booms, that time when they discovered gold, next a real estate speculation craze, and now the movin'-pictures. The first two blew up, same as this will before long. I guess I and you are lucky fools to of got a look in while the going was good."

"Lucky?" Lucinda questioned dubiously.

A grin of indescribable irony glimmered on the swarthy, shrewd features. "Something to tell the kiddies about when they gather around your knee, Miss Lee: 'What Grandma done and seen in the wild old days in Hollywood.'"

"I don't know about that. And what makes you think times will ever be different?"

"Take it from me, little lady, things can't hold up much longer the way they been in pictures. Nobody with a brain in his bean would look for it. Trouble is, nobody like that would take the fillum business serious when it was learning to walk. Now it's wearing long pants and driving its own machine, it's no use expecting it to listen to what brains got to tell it. All the same, if it don't – good night!

"Ah, I see what's going on all the time! Audiences sick of punk pictures and putting up a howl for better, producers combing the world for authors, artists, dramatists, all the people what have got the stuff pictures need to make 'em good – and the old guard back here dug in and ready to die before they'll surrender the trenches to anybody that knows more'n they do. And why wouldn't they? It's meat and drink and gasoline to them to keep things going like they are. Where'd be the sense in them giving the glad hand to the guy who's got it in him to do them out of a nice soft job?

"Take authors, now. We're having a big run on authors just't present. The producer figures anybody who's got brains enough to write a novel that won't wobble if a person gives it a hard look, ought to have brains enough to do as good with a picture story. But does he get a chanst? Don't make me laugh. The poor simps come out here on every train with their eyes shining, full of joy and pep on account of what the producers promised they was going to let 'em do in pictures. And every train takes 'em back. What's the answer?

"The answer gen'ly's a bird in ridin'-breeches and a property high-brow, calls himself director-general or something gaudy like that – same bird's been making the pictures the producers want to make better. He gives Friend Author the glad smile and a hard look and starts right in telling him all what he can't do in pictures. Author wants to know how come. 'Because I say you can't, and I know everything they is to know about pictures.' Author asks producer what about it. Producer says, says he: 'If my director-general says you can't, stands to reason you can't. Say: how do you get this way? I brought you out here to learn you to make pictures, not for you to learn my director-general.' Author sees the point and fades back East. Director-general tells producer: 'Too bad about that poor fish, but he didn't savvy the picture angle, and I couldn't make him see it nohow.'

"Or take another case. Producer buys a big story, like, now…"

"Paradise Lost," Lucinda suggested mischievously.

"Who wrote it?"

"John Milton."

"Never heard of him. Make a good picture?"

"I'm afraid it would be difficult. But it's a big story."

"All right. Producer hands this, now, Paradise Lost to his scenario editor. She reads it, turns pale around the gills, sends out an emergency call for the director-general, says to him, says she: 'Listen, sweetheart, this'll be a knock-out if it ever gets on the screen the way it's wrote. The guy what wrote this knew pictures before they was invented.' Director-general says: 'Gosh! that won't never do, or first thing you know we'll have this boob Milton on the lot telling us our business. Stew up the continuity to suit yourself, pet, and leave the rest to me.' Fin'ly Paradise Lost gets on the screen as 'A Cyril de Menthe Production entitled Sex Against Sex, by Queenie Hoozis, featuring Hope Honeybunch with bathroom fixtures by Joseph Urban and telephones hidden by Sherlock Holmes, suggested by a magazine story by J. Milton.' If it gets by, Queenie and Cyril cop the credit. If it falls down they tell the producer they done their best, but he'd ought to of known better, it ain't no use trying to make pictures only from stories framed special for the screen by somebody who cut their eye-teeth on a strip of celluloid – like Queenie. Every time anything like that happens the fillum business takes a long stride forward – towards the end of its rope."

"Still, I don't quite see – "

"It comes down to this, Miss Lee: nothing short of an earthquake's ever going to jar the Queenies and Cyrils loose from their jobs and give brains a chanst to horn in."

"But if you see all this so clearly, Mr. Zinn, why don't you start the indicated reforms yourself?"

"Who, me? Naw, naw, little lady; quit your kidding. I don't know enough. Me try to sit in with sure-enough brains? Say! I seen the way you looked when I wanted to know who wrote Paradise Lost. No: Isadore Zinn belongs in with the rest of the bunch that's been good enough up to about now but's got to be junked before pictures will get a chanst to be any better'n they ought to be. Oh, I ain't got no kick coming; I've made mine and put it away where nothing real mean's ever going to happen to it; and when the sky falls on Hollywood it'll find me some other place, playing pinochle and absolutely innocent of the entire fillum business."

"You don't seriously believe that will ever happen."

"It'll happen just as quick's Wall Street wakes up to the way it's been gypped – and it's moaning and tossing in its sleep right now. Wall Street put up its good money because pictures made half-way on the level earned more and earned it quicker'n any other investment they could find. Wall Street didn't worry none about what graft was being gotten away with as long's they thought they was going to get their money back and a hundred per cent. profit every so often. But that was yesterday, when audiences would shell out cheerful and sit through anything because pictures moved. Today they're still lining up at the box-office, but only because they can't believe the day won't never come when they'll maybe see something worth their time and coin. Tomorrow they'll be saying, 'Show me!' before they'll dig up as much's a thin dime. And that's when Wall Street's due to tumble to it, they's only one way for it to save its investments in the fillum game, and that is take hold of it and run it like a honest-to-goodness business. And when that happens, when the fancy salaries get pared down to the quick, and the good graft's all gone, and there ain't no way no more for the assistant property-man to charge the upkeep of his lady-friend's limousine to overhead, and the director what wants money to build ancient Rome with and burn it down for a showy interlude to a society comedy will only get the hearty laugh – why, along about that time a terrible lot of people are going to find out California's a cold, hard place, spite of the climate and all, and a heap of highly hand-painted automobiles is going to be dumped on the used-car market in Los Angeles."

Some disturbing mental echo of this screed one day inspired Lucinda to devote several painful hours to totting up her bank account, a duty which she had been religiously forgetting for months, and whose performance brought to light the fact that she had already given Harry Lontaine cheques to his order in the sum of two-hundred and ten thousand dollars, to be cashed by him and deposited to the credit of Linda Lee Inc.

If she felt slightly dashed by this discovery, it was less because of the money involved – for she had from the first been prepared to pay more dearly for her whistle than Lontaine had declared it would cost – than because the end was not yet, the first picture remained unfinished, many heavy payments on account of it were still to be met, and her private extravagances, added to the financing of Linda Lee Inc., had left little worth mentioning of the money which Harford Willis, at her requisition, had paid into her drawing account in New York.

It was now necessary to write Willis and ask him to find her more money; and that involved, as a matter of simple courtesy to that old friend and a devoted steward of her interests, explanations which she would much rather not make just yet.

But her only other course was to consult Lontaine in the faint hope that out of the sums entrusted to him there might be enough left in the company's treasury to see it through the present production. And this she hesitated to do because of an intuitive feeling that he would take this as directly challenging his competency to handle her money if not his good faith. Lontaine was such a sensitive soul… However, he spared her the pain of deciding to do nothing, for the next time they met he blandly advised Lucinda that the company could do with another twenty thousand as soon as she could find time to draw the cheque; and on learning that it would have to wait a few days, or until she could hear from Willis, seemed considerably discountenanced; or else fancy misled her.

As for that, it might have been merely her fancy that Lontaine thenceforward betrayed a disposition to keep out of her way, and when he couldn't was at pains to iron out the wrinkles in his temper before venturing to respond to her always friendly advances; that perceptible hesitation prefaced the utterances Lontaine addressed to her, constraint had crept into their relations, till then so easy and cordial, and added opacity was to be remarked in the stare of those introspective blue eyes.

Since it was unthinkable that she should be long embarrassed, for want of ready money, or that Lontaine should believe she could be, Lucinda couldn't imagine why he should show such signals of a mind perturbed, and could only do her best to dwell upon the matter not at all. Heaven knew she had other worries a-plenty to cope with!

It was annoying, for example, to feel that one was expected to feign blindness to what was going on under one's very nose, namely Fanny's essays in the ancient and vulgar art of vamping, with Bel in the rôle of voluntary victim – or a vastly better actor than he had ever before shown himself to be. Nor did the quite transparent naivete of Fanny's methods, as Lucinda viewed them, cause patience to be any the less a labored virtue. If you asked Lucinda, Hollywood had added no finish to Fanny's cosmopolitan technique of flirtation, but rather the reverse; in this respect, as in too many others, Fanny seemed to have taken on a shade too much the colour of her environment. One looked and made allowances for the crudely obvious in women educated by directors to believe that certain elementary gestures (for which see any screen) were surely efficacious with men of every class alike. But Fanny knew better than to make herself grotesque.

Such, however, was the one word that seemed to suit the way she went with Bellamy. And when one had watched her practise and repeat without end the trick of the upward, sham-timid glance of eyes demurely wise, accompanied by the provocative pout of aggressively kissable life, the look that said openly: I think you're rather nice and I know I am; so why are we wasting time? – and had seen it work an apparently invariable effect upon one who called himself a man of the world, who should long since have graduated from the social kindergartens where such tactics are vogue – well, one simply longed to cuff his ears and tell him to quit being such a silly fool. It gave one furiously to repent having relinquished the right to bestow upon Bel gratuitous advice for his own good.

Wherefore it came to pass that, as a general thing, whenever Fanny was wanted for a scene and was not to be found in the neighbourhood of the set, she would ultimately be discovered somewhere on the lot, more often than not in the most public corner of it, industriously rehearsing her wiles for the debatable benefit of Bellamy.

And this the man who had declared that his besetting sin had lost all savour for him since it had done its part to alienate his wife!

Lucinda nevertheless assured herself that she didn't so much mind Bel's inconsistency – for what were his protestations to her today? – or even Fanny's commonplace coquetries; it was the surreptitious airs with which Fanny sought to envelop these goings-on, the reticence which she persisted in observing in respect of their effect, that made their joint stupidity maddening. For never since that afternoon when Bel had caught Lucinda in the act of kissing Summerlad before a camera, and Fanny had playfully announced her intention of vamping him to a fare-ye-well, had she chosen to mention his name in any relation to herself. In the local vernacular which she had been so quick to pick up, Fanny seemed to think she was getting away with something.

Lucinda resisted the temptation to disillusion her friend mostly because of a faint-hearted hope that Fanny might at any moment redeem herself with a scornful report of Bel's gullibility, but in part because of doubt whether Bel were being taken in as completely as he appeared to be. It was just possible that this old hand at philandering was simply playing Fanny's game to find out what she meant by it. Certainly he showed no propensity to favouritism. The path of his amourette with the Marquis girl ran parallel to that which he pursued with Fanny, perhaps ran faster, but strangely proved not half so tiresome to the spectator. In spite of all that Summerlad had said of her, Lucinda entertained an honest admiration for the Marquis as she was today, considered her physically quite a fascinating creature, which she unquestionably was in this revised phase, and found what Bel saw in her far more easy to understand than what he saw in Fanny. This was something partly to be accounted for by the circumstance that Lucinda saw comparatively so little of Miss Marquis, saw her so seldom save at a distance and when she was on her dignity – when, as Summerlad had it, she had slapped on thick the make-up of a lady. That it was in good measure make-up merely Lucinda had memories to testify. For all that, she saw the girl comporting herself toward Bellamy with a manner which she thought Fanny might have copied to good profit. But when she confided as much to Summerlad she found him darkly suspicious of Nelly's present good behaviour.

"Don't worry," he advised: "That young woman will surprise you yet. She's being nice now and enjoying the novelty. Chances are she took the cure, that time she disappeared. But it never lasts. Once the old hop gets its hooks into anybody it never lets go, really. It may seem to be licked for a while, but it's only waiting for a moment of weakness. Wait till Nelly gets bored playing up to the gentlemanly attentions of your friend, Mr. Druce, wait till she wants him to do something he doesn't want to. Just wait. If you admire fireworks, believe me, Linda, your waiting won't be wasted."

Having said which, Summerlad made haste to change the subject. But Lucinda had already learned that any reference to Nelly Marquis was calculated to make him restive. A circumstance in itself not the least irksome of the many which she counted as afflictions. She needed badly a congenial confidant, and Lynn was newly become anything but that, had, indeed, never seemed quite the same since the first night of his return. Another black mark to add to Bellamy's score. For Lynn was inevitably and pardonably disgusted with the situation at the studio, where he couldn't turn around without running into either the Marquis girl or the husband of the woman he loved. Then much of the old delight in sharing working-quarters had been lost through their tacit agreement that, under these changed conditions, a trifle more reserve wouldn't come amiss when they met under the public eye. But now, even when they were alone, the old-time spontaneity was missing, and, Lucinda was sure, through no fault of hers. It was in Lynn that she thought to detect a strange new absence of ease, what she could almost have termed a hang-dog air, a furtive fashion of watching her, if he thought she wasn't aware, that was swift to change, as soon as he found she was, to a species of feeble bravado distastefully reminiscent of Bel when Bel had been drinking just enough to feel it and not enough to have become callous; an air of having done something he oughtn't and living in instant dread of being found out.