The Celebrity (18 page)

Thorn supervised the stowing of luggage, tipped the porter—Gregory tried to see how much, but couldn’t—and opened the back door of the car. “You girls get in there,” he said. “We have to talk business.”

For most of the long drive Thorn proceeded to tell Gregory what he had accomplished since yesterday afternoon. His activity had already gone far beyond the talk with MacQuade. He had met Hyman Bernstein, the screen writer assigned to
The Good World,
whose office Gregory would share; Dick Morosky, the director; and Harry Von Brann, President of Imperial Century, who had bought the book and would produce the picture. These three had been teamed up, he told Gregory, on some of the most respected—and successful—pictures ever made; Gregory was a lucky man to have his book in their hands. There was a big rush on already. “Shooting script May first,” Thorn said with authority, “and in the cans October first. They’ll release around Christmas, to get under the wire for the Academy.”

“Whew. You’ve been covering some ground, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been finding out how things work around here. Josh is a great help. He’s letting me use an office down the hall from his—there’s a lot of stuff piled up already for me. I told you there would be. And Josh seems to think I’m O.K. to have around.”

“Evidently.” He said it with a sort of warm helpless admiration, and looked at his brother inquiringly.

“Over our first drink,” Thorn explained modestly, “I happened to hit on a happy phrase, and it appealed to Josh. I said I was out here as your non-pressagent. He apparently likes things on the offbeat. ‘Business representative,’ I said, ‘and non-pressagent.’ I told him the way you feel about things, and he pumped me about how I fit into this whole deal. So I gave him an earful.” Here Thorn took his eyes from the road to glance at Gregory. “‘Non-pressagent,’” Thorn said again and laughed.

“It’s a good way of putting it,” Gregory said obligingly.

Thorn looked back to the road. “This damn traffic is as bad as New York. But at least they stagger the lights, and they do have some bright gimmicks worked out. In Beverly Hills, they have the street names right at the curb, painted on in big black letters, so your headlights can pick them up at night. And every block is a new hundred block.”

“A new what?”

“Hundred block. Suppose there are only four houses on one street and the last one is number Three Thirty-Two. Just the same, the first house on the next street will be number Four Hundred. So you get the three-hundred block, the four-hundred block, the five, the six. You can’t get mixed up or lost. It’s bright, isn’t it?”

Gregory smiled. “You’re a push-over for the place, aren’t you?”

“There
is
something about it. And for all the money and the fame and success, it’s so human.
Everybody
got the point about the way you feel, not just Josh.”

“Were they planning interviews and parties or don’t they do as much of that as people think?”

“Never mind what they
were
doing,” Thorn said with satisfaction. “The way I’ve got it now is no interviews, no pictures, no lectures—there’s a terrible woman named Martin—no, never mind her. All that’s left now is maybe one or two parties. The Von Branns have asked all of us for Friday night and you can’t tell the man who bought your book to go to hell, can you?”

It happens that in the month which followed the uncertain transfer of that ten-dollar bill on the station platform, nothing venal occurred in the life and work of Gregory Johns. At the studio, no single assault was made on his integrity; not one of the men assigned to his book was a genius; nobody told him what to think or what to write; no seven-year contracts or complex option deals were offered to him. Neither Von Brann nor Morosky nor Bernstein wanted to improve his book by adding a chase, a killing, a case of amnesia, or even much more of a love story than it already had. A change in title was not even discussed; the movie was to be called
The Good World.

The happy result of these six negatives was a seventh: by the end of his first working week, Gregory Johns no longer heard the thin persistent wail of his Martin Heights forebodings. My God, he thought, I
like
working with these people; it’s going to be all right; it
is
all right. I’ve learned a lot out here already; I’ll learn more. And Hy Bernstein and I could become real friends.

Since inner contentment is conducive to general well-being, it thus becomes all the more remarkable that, on Friday afternoon, Gregory Johns should have found himself thoroughly ill. At lunch he had suddenly gone hot and flushed; by four o’clock his eyes were stinging, his head buzzing, his cough strangling.

“That’s quite a business,” Hy Bernstein said, after one paroxysm which left Gregory wrung and limp. “Better get home and take care of it.”

Gregory shook his head and looked grateful for Hy’s concern. Hy was a few years older than he, a short, homely, unassuming man who had once written verse for poverty-stricken magazines. From amorphous poetry to rock-firm construction of screenplays was a long voyage, but it had taken Hyman Bernstein to a port he was content to call home.

“I was all through with that damn cold,” Gregory said. “I forgot I ever had it. Now look.”

“Go ahead and knock off for now. I’ll finish laying out the scene alone. You get to bed and stay there.”

“I can’t. We’re going out to dinner.”

“With that?” He picked up the telephone and asked for a taxi. Then he said, “No, better get me Thornton Johns’ office instead.”

On the drive home, Thorn spoke familiarly of Virus X. “Half of Hollywood’s had it. Sometimes it sends you to a hospital and sometimes it hits you for a couple of hours and then you feel great.”

“It’s not Virus X,” Gregory said.

“You get a hot bath and a good long rest. We’re not due at the Von Branns’ until eight.”

But by seven-thirty it was clear that Gregory was in no shape to go anywhere. Abby had telephoned for a doctor, who had taken his temperature, pulse; and blood pressure, looked down his throat and into his ears, stabbed his finger for a blood count, written out three prescriptions, and ordered him to stay in bed until further notice.

When Abby went in to report to Cindy and Thorn, she found Cindy putting on her second earring and Thorn sitting half dressed on the edge of the bed. They both looked worried. After Abby told them the doctor thought it only a relapse, they continued to look worried. “You two go to the party anyway,” Abby ended comfortingly.

“We wouldn’t
dream
—” Cindy said, and glanced longingly at herself in the mirror. Her new dark red evening dress was immensely becoming; she had had her hair done differently; she had for the first time in her life experimented with blue eye shadow and mascara.

“You have to go,” Abby said calmly. “Two missing at a dinner isn’t as bad as four.”

Thorn waved this aside. “Mrs. Von Brann had to ask me and Cindy, but it’s Gregory and you they planned this around. If you can’t go, we stay home too.”

“We wouldn’t
want
to go, anyway,” Cindy said with no ring of conviction, “and leave you to sit here alone, with Gregory sick.”

“Oh, heavens,” said Abby. She marched to the telephone and explained at length to Mrs. Von Brann. When she hung up, she said, “You’re expected. They’d feel awful if you didn’t show either, so run along and have fun.”

“Well, in that case,” Thorn said.

“And please drop these at the drugstore,” Abby said, “and say it’s a rush.”

Cindy reached eagerly for the prescriptions, as if they held absolution for an undefined crime, and said, in a practical tone, “Thorn, if we’re going, you’d better hurry.”

Abby said, “You look lovely, Cindy,” waved vaguely at both of them, and left Thorn to his dressing.

She went back into the bedroom and over to Gregory. He was sleeping. She tiptoed about, putting away his things, closing the open lid of the jeweler’s box in which lay his new evening studs and cuff links. Still virgin, she thought, and smiled to herself. She hung up his never-worn dinner jacket, whose travel-creased lapels she had been pressing when he had come in from the studio. As she hooked the hanger over the suspended horizontal pole in the huge empty-seeming closet, the coat swung into her only evening dress, and the two garments swayed together as if in a dance, slow-rhythmed and graceful.

She opened the window wider and paused. Gregory’s breathing was now deep and regular. She went over to him and cupped her palm lightly over his forehead. It seemed cooler already, and his face untroubled, even tranquil. She stood looking down at him and, in the semidarkness of the room, smiled once again.

High on a hill in Pacific Palisades, looking out to the ocean, the Von Brann mansion might have been a huge sprawling lighthouse at the edge of a cliff. The boom of the surf made a distant unchanging pedal point to the staccato laughter and voices issuing from the house. The fragrance of flowers and shrubs and trees, the moonlight shining down upon two tennis courts and a kidney-shaped pool, the shining hoods of many Lincolns and Cadillacs (and, unexpectedly enough, on the great hulk of a moving van parked at one side of the six-car garage)—all these attested to the fact that here life was well indulged, expensive, and cajoling.

Inside the house, thirty-two dinner guests could have attested to the same thing. And none more soulfully than Lucinda and Thornton Johns. The Von Branns were wonderful hosts; from the first moment, Harry and Peg Von Brann had acted as if it were even better to have an author’s relatives to show off than the author himself. It was true that for about fifteen minutes, Thorn and Cindy had found themselves victims of a faint discomfort, as at too big an experience, but with the second round of drinks they began to absorb more easily the undeniable fact that they were in the same room with such people as Joan Crawford, Danny Kaye, Betty Hutton, the Bogarts, Jill Goodwyn, and Darryl Zanuck. It was a dream; it was unbelievable; it was happening; it was life on the grand scale, and no other kind of life could even compare with it.

Then a minor mishap occurred.

“Mr. and Mrs. Thornton Johns,” Peg Von Brann said for the tenth time, as two more couples came into the room. “Martha and Fred Maynes, Bob and Alice Cohen—”

“Oh, Mr. Johns,” Alice Cohen cried, “I’ve read the galleys of your book and—”

“
My
book—Good Lord, I didn’t write it!”

“Oh, Alice!” said Peg Von Brann. “I said
‘Thornton
Johns.’”

“I’m sorry—I—please forgive—”

Thorn had given one agonized thought to the proximity of the Bogarts and Joan Crawford. “It’s my brother, Gregory Johns, who’s the author, not me,” he said, with an affability he did not feel. “I’m just his agent, manager, representative, whatever you want to call it.”

Alice was more flustered than ever. “Well, anyway, please tell your brother I loved every word of his book. Wherever I go, I spread the good word.”

“Spread
The Good World
I trust,” Thorn said lightly and the burst of laughter from Alice Cohen and Peg and the others complimented him for being adroit. Then everybody talked about the book at once. They had read the galleys, or were just reading the galleys, or had been promised a set of galleys that very afternoon and could scarcely wait until they had them in their own two hands. Where was his brother? When could they meet him and thank him for so wonderful a piece of work? How long had he been ill? Was it serious? Virus X, Virus X, Virus X.

By the time the last of the guests had arrived at nearly nine o’clock, Thornton had had to disclaim authorship once more, but this time he did so without even an initial start of confusion: By then there had been a great deal of talk about books and plays and movies—“Didn’t Dudley Nichols write
Mourning Becomes Electra
?” somebody had asked.

“No, it was either Mankiewicz or Trumbo.”

“I bet it
was
Dudley.”

“Well, it wasn’t. You’re thinking of
For Whom the Bell Tolls—
he wrote that.”

“He did not. It was that boy Ardrey.”

“You’re crazy. Ardrey wrote
Madame Bovary.
”

Nobody, including the host and hostess, seemed to wonder when they were going to eat, and with sudden shame, Thorn remembered his tense misery at home when Hulda kept guests waiting ten minutes for dinner. He glanced at Harry Von Brann. Harry was talking to Humphrey Bogart and Cindy, or rather, Thorn thought uneasily, Harry and Humphrey Bogart were listening to Cindy. Cindy was animated, her voice ringing even more than usual, but apparently she was being amusing, for both men were laughing. Thorn wasn’t as lucky; he was talking to two men whose names he had not caught. Discreetly he managed a look at the clock above the mantel; it was twenty minutes to ten.

Just then the doors to a vast dining room were thrown wide. For a moment there was silence, and then everybody cried out at once.

“Peg, how wonderful!”

“Harry—how divine!”

“When did you have it changed? Just for tonight? Oh, darlings, how thrilling!”

The room was large enough for a ball. Even Thorn and Cindy knew at once that this was not the Von Branns’ ordinary decor for a dining room. Except for four large round tables, and the chairs around them, there was no sign of furniture in the room, no pictures, no rugs. “We had everything moved out in that van you saw,” Peg was explaining somewhere behind him. “It’ll all be moved in again tomorrow.”

The walls and ceiling of the room were hung with hundreds of yards of rippling blue velvet, iridescent with patches of sequins in the shape of stars, moons, comets; in a great swath above them was the Milky Way. The tablecloths and napkins were of the same blue and sequins; suspended from the two huge crystal chandeliers were thousands of glass icicles, and for centerpieces on the tables were four great confections of spun sugar that might have been snow. The floor was blue-white and gleaming.

“It’s ice,” somebody shouted.

“It’s ice. It’s real ice,” everybody echoed. One of the men tried to slide on the floor; another bent down to touch it. “It’s not ice, it’s warm. It would melt if it was ice.”