Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"But – my Gawd! – you can't do that, Miss Lee – you can't hold up this production like that. Why, it'll take weeks – "

"How long will it take, please, Mr. Coakley?"

"Well, I don't know, Miss Lee – I might be able to rush it through for you in a week or ten days."

"There!" Nolan obtruded an excited smirk and weaving hands between Lucinda and the technical director. "You hear what Coakley says. Ten days! You can't hold up this production ten days, Miss Lee."

"I can," Lucinda corrected coldly, "and will, no matter how long it takes to make this set resemble a place self-respecting people would patronize."

"But – listen here! – you can't go to work and upset all my plans at the last moment, like this. Company called for half-past eight – fifty extra people hired for four days' work – orchestra from the Alexandria and all – the best caterer in Los Angeles engaged to serve the eats – ! You can't throw me down like this – "

"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan. You should have consulted me before ordering such changes on your own responsibility – "

"Look here: am I directing this picture, or ain't I?"

"I'll answer that question when you answer mine: Am I paying for this production or are you? And if I am, are you the only one whose wishes are to be considered?"

"Listen, now, Miss Lee." Nolan made a frantic effort to be calm and urbane. He swallowed hard. "Listen: I don't want to have any trouble with you, but you're making it all-fired hard for me. I've been in this business ever since there was a studio in Hollywood, I've directed hundreds of productions, hundreds of 'em, I ought to know my business – "

"It was on that assumption precisely that you were hired," Lucinda reminded him sweetly.

"But ever since I been working with you, I've felt – you've made me feel – damn it! you've been watching me and thinking sarcastic things about the way I do – "

"Did you never before suspect you were psychic, Mr. Nolan?"

"And now you openly criticize my judgment about this set and say you won't work on it – "

"You understand me exactly," Lucinda assented.

"You mean that?"

She nodded.

"Well, that – settles – it!" Nolan flung both hands above his head and waggled them insanely. "That settles it! I'm through – I'm finished – done! I'm out! I quit!"

He hesitated a single instant, searching Lucinda's face to see it blench at this awful threat; and in disappointment whirled on a heel and barged out of the set so blindly that he blundered into one of the frames and knocked it flat.

Lucinda nodded quietly to the technical man.

"Please make the changes as soon as you can, Mr. Coakley. It's all right: don't apologize any more. I quite understand it wasn't your fault."

The president of Linda Lee Inc. wasn't in his office, neither was his car in the parking yard; but Nolan evidently knew where to find him, for Lucinda had not been twenty minutes in her rooms at the Hollywood when Lontaine's knuckles rattled on the door. His agitation, when she admitted him, was intense, almost pitiable. One gathered that he considered a tiff between star and director a catastrophe second only to national censorship of pictures. He stammered painfully over his account of Nolan's ultimatum, which had been accompanied by a demand for the balance of his pay in full and at once.

"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda …"

"He hasn't had time to get my letter."

"I don't suppose – you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."

"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"

"But he claims you as good as fired him – "

"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that misstatement of fact… "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll have to hire himself on again."

And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communiqué to the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.

Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's eyes…

To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical, though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.

In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.

"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely, "is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right, really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over their surprise.

"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."

Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as he conceived it, had no business to find place.

Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy, the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.

If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled; in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by the board, for very lack of space.

Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she took no part.

And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.

Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view to lending distinction to her début.

By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet, Nelly's (that is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up, after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.

If not strikingly novel, the business seemed simple and innocuous enough to Lucinda, and she posed for it according to instructions and without misgiving.

But when, the next day, she sat with Nolan in the projection-room, reviewing the rushes, this is what the screen revealed to her astounded eyes:

She saw first a stripling fashionable, an admirer of hers in the story, stroll down a section of sidewalk in the Los Angeles shopping district (which Nolan asserted was "Fifth Avenue to a T") enter a florist's shop, select roses, and scribble a card to accompany them, while the florist summoned an errand boy, a repulsive white slug of a child, eight or nine years of age, heavy with unwholesome fat and wearing an habitual look of hopeless vacuity, whom Lucinda had several times noticed, not without wonder, as he loitered drearily about the stage.

As she now saw him, the boy had been heartlessly shoe-horned into the brass-bound livery of a page, and wore upon his feet a brace of leathern wrecks which even the broad charity of a Charlie Chaplin would have hesitated to call shoes.

Waiting for the card to be written, this bleached sausage of a child restlessly shuffled his tragic feet, and again and again wiped them on each other. To make sure that nothing of the fine Comedy of the business would be overlooked, the feet were isolated in an heroic close-up.

She saw the boy take the box of roses and leave the shop to deliver them. As he emerged to the street the fiendish camera pounced upon his feet and again held them up to derision in a close-up wherein they resembled more than anything else abnormal vegetable growths uncannily animate. Nor was this enough. With the savage elemental humour of a Yahoo the camera hounded those fungoid feet as they clumped and dragged and faltered along the sidewalk, their monstrosity painfully stressed by contrast with the trim legs and dainty feet of feminine passers-by, the decently shod feet of men.

When unstinted quantities of film had been squandered in this delectable pursuit, the Comedy Feet were shown performing a side-splitting stumble over the threshold to the supper club establishment.

The close-up of Lucinda's feet with her dancing partner's was then disclosed; and the camera shifted its intimate attentions to another pair of feet disgracefully clad, which were discovered in the act of pressing the pedals of a piano and appeared to belong to a low comedy stage mother whom Nolan had foisted upon Lucinda in his version of the continuity. These last the camera followed as they left the piano and shuffled across the floor to meet the feet of the errand-boy, then as they crossed to halt near the feet of Lucinda.

Followed the ascent of the close-up to frame on Lucinda's face as she smiled down at her armful of roses.