The Celebrity (19 page)

“It’s plastic,” Harry Von Brann said. “My wife,” he added indulgently, with a wave that included the Solar System around and above him, “has gone mad.”

“Oh, the glasses, oh, how clever, Peg.” This shout, too, instantly swelled into a tone poem of rapture.

“I will admit,” Peg said modestly, “the glasses are rather sweet.”

The water tumblers and wine goblets were not supposed to look like snow or ice or stars in a blue sky. They were merely crystal, but instead of being the conventional array of assorted sizes and shapes, the four glasses at each place were all identical—brandy glasses of giant size. Rapid calculation told half the ladies in the room that there were one hundred and thirty-six of them—a froth of anchored balloons which might float skyward at any moment, carrying the tables aloft with them.

The babble of praise did not die away until a butler and a bevy of footmen in tailcoats and white ties began to serve the first course. Across the distance of their separate tables, Thorn’s and Cindy’s eyes met in a look of mutual congratulation.

Thornton saw that Cindy was well placed indeed, with a handsome young actor on one side and their host on the other. As for him, he was ecstatic, with Peg Von Brann at his left and, at his right, the beauteous, the famous, the sensational Jill Goodwyn, star of
Fire, Fire,
and
My Life For Love,
and
I’ve Gone Away.

When he could absorb what was being said to him, Thorn realized that Peg was talking about skiing and ice-skating. The whole table now took her up and discussed favorite vacation sports and resorts. They ranged the world, from the Riviera or Honolulu for swimming to Sun Valley or Switzerland for skiing. The Riviera, Switzerland—suddenly Thorn was back at his office window in New York, looking down at the two rivers and their freighters and ocean liners, moving slowly off and away. Who could have predicted, that aching afternoon, that in hardly two months he himself would be an entire continent removed from that window, that office, that derisive inner voice telling him he was a nobody and would always be a nobody?

Thornton Johns gulped with emotion. He did not dare to meet anybody’s eyes, and he was glad that Peg was now talking about her children, for that meant no calls on him beyond appreciative nods and monosyllables. His eyes kept roaming the room; they could not get their fill of the spectacular sight and the spectacular women and their spectacular jewels. His mind stumbled over the effort to believe he could be present in such surroundings and in such a gathering. Nobody could joke this off as the blathering of the clans or complain that there wasn’t one good hot prospect in sight. He was hip-deep in hot prospects! For an instant, the cool concise voice of Opportunity spoke to him.

At that moment, a remarkable thing happened. His wandering eye met the eye of Joan Crawford at the next table and, without thinking, he smiled at her. She smiled back.

Thornton Johns’ inner spirit glowed bright as tungsten. Nothing seemed too remote, too impossible. He had not yet dared to turn from the comparative safety of Peg Von Brann to the hazards of Jill Goodwyn, but now he felt himself unbeatable. He made appropriate remarks to Peg and looked to the right. The most famous profile in Hollywood was still talking about vacations.

“And are you,” he cut in, “packing off next week to the other side of the world?” His tone was somber, as of a man who had brooded long and bitterly on this possibility. The profile became a full face and he almost blinked.

“Not till summer. If I’m not dead by then.”

“You’re doing a picture?”

“I’m
always
doing a picture. Finish one, start another. That’s my life.”

“Chain-smoking.”

Jill Goodwyn gave him a dazzling smile. “Exactly. You’re bright, aren’t you?”

“Am I?” His smile was just as dazzling.

“Yes. You were beautiful over that silly Alice Cohen,” she said. “I almost applauded. I mean like this.” She clapped her slender hands twice. “And anyway, you have to be bright to be people’s agents. Says my agent.”

“I’m not people’s agents—just my brother’s.”

She looked at him inquiringly. Her great gray eyes were kind, even encouraging, and Thornton Johns thought, This is really going, this could go on if I play it right. “I’m not even a real honest-to-God agent,” he said with a kind of humble bravado, as if he were risking everything on honesty. “What I really am is an insurance broker.”

“An insurance broker?”

“Just another salesman with a foot in the door.”

Jill Goodwyn smiled again. This time it was not a dazzling smile but a gentle, pensive one and it was a pretty thing to see. Fleetingly Thornton Johns remembered Diana’s smile, and a brief pain went through him, as at a guilt yet to be established.

“At least your foot isn’t in your mouth,” Miss Goodwyn said, “like
my
insurance man’s. What a fool
that
one is.”

“Shopping?” Thorn said quickly. “Or just winning friends?”

She laughed. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Yet.”

The cool concise voice of Opportunity spoke once more and, as if in rebuttal, another voice immediately said, Don’t be cheap. Well, if not cheap, then at least inopportune. Take it easy. Wait. See. This could lead you places that have nothing to do with being Gregory’s brother or agent or manager or anything else. Thornton Johns looked once more about the room. He could feel Jill Goodwyn watching him, but he took his time. When he spoke, he lowered his voice. “Is your husband here?” he asked. “And does he decide about your insurance—or your friends?”

“I haven’t a husband,” Jill Goodwyn answered. “And when I had, he didn’t.”

“About either?”

“About neither.”

There was a pause. She picked up one of the fragile glasses, and held it cupped lovingly in her hands. Through her fingers the wine made curving rays of red; she tilted her head to one side and studied the effect. It was like a cartoon of sunrise, as if she were holding a bubble of a world while a new day came up on all sides at once. She knew Thornton Johns was watching her, not missing the lowering of her lids, not deaf to her small sigh. He was more attractive than anybody she had met in months. It wasn’t only that he was handsome, with his three-cornered blue eyes and tow-headed crew cut and striking tallness; handsome men were all over this place, where else? But the handsome men of Hollywood were stars too;
they
looked at any girl or woman, even at a Jill Goodwyn, expecting to be adored. This man watching every flick of expression on her face wasn’t expecting anything. He was thrilled to be near you, to see you smile, to hear you talk. He was ready to adore
you.
He remembered
you
were the star. Jill Goodwyn raised her glass to her lips and took a small sip of wine. Then, without turning to Thorn, she spoke. “Would you and your wife like to come lunch with me on Sunday? And your brother, if he’s well enough?”

T
HE “TERRIBLE WOMAN NAMED
Martin” was on the telephone when Thorn arrived at his borrowed office on Monday morning. It was the fourth time she had called him, and his usual fund of patience with people who were offering money to Gregory was running very thin. Besides, he was in no mood to cope with terrible people offering anything; he had enough problems for a Monday morning as it was. Gregory, who was still too ill yesterday to go to Jill Goodwyn’s luncheon party, had insisted on reporting for work today and would no doubt end up in hospital for the rest of his contract. And at breakfast, Cindy had treated him to a masterly tirade on the subject of Hollywood gossip, and the subtle difference between admiring your hostess and openly groveling before her at the edge of a swimming pool all afternoon while twenty famous people watched you.

Thornton picked up the telephone lifelessly. “Good morning, Mrs. Martin.”

“It’s me again, Mr. Johns,” she said brightly. “Helene Martin, of the Hollywood ‘Friends of Books.’”

“Yes. Good morning.”

“It’s just that I’ve talked with the Vice-President and the Treasurer, and they think we could make it five hundred instead.”

Thorn’s fund of patience grew larger. Not that Gregory would lecture anyway but one kind of finesse was called for at one level of finance and another at another. The two-hundred level, he thought, as Mrs. Martin went on talking, and the five-hundred. The two-hundred block and the five-hundred.

“So, with this emergency,” Mrs. Martin was saying, “if I could just come up and see you personally, I could at least report I’d left no stone unturned.”

“Well, then,” Thorn said graciously, “if it’ll make you feel any better, come up and turn some stones tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I’m right in the neighborhood this very minute and—well, you see, the meeting is day after tomorrow, and it
is
my first year as President of ‘Friends of Books’ and—”

Twenty minutes later she was being shown in, and as Thorn rose to greet her, he wondered why she should need to be so ardent a clubwoman. She was no Jill Goodwyn, but she wasn’t a Hokinson either. She was slender and Thorn’s eye told him that her heavy linen suit came from no budget basement. She was fortyish but, he thought quickly, who isn’t? Even Jill Goodwyn, so delicately young on the screen, was, at a swimming pool in brilliant sunlight—

“So we decided to go as high as five hundred,” Mrs. Martin was explaining rapidly. “Why, for a half hour’s talk, that’s awfully high pay.”

“A half-hour?”

“Well, I’ll put all my cards on the table.” She tossed her head defiantly. “It’s our tenth anniversary, and we had a cancellation, and all the famous authors out here now are booked solid this whole week. So we’re really stuck. It’s awful to be stuck for your tenth anniversary.”

“Yes, it is.” Thornton Johns shook his head in sympathy.

“And it would be such an
easy
lecture—you know, not politics or anything he’d have to write out first. It’s the personal little things, like where he gets his ideas and how he started writing and what hours he writes best, and all.”

Just then Josh MacQuade opened the door, paused, said, “Sorry,” and started to back away.

“Come on in, Josh,” Thorn called and proceeded with introductions. To MacQuade, Mrs. Martin recapitulated her arguments so winningly that Thorn suffered with her when Josh said, almost coldly, “It’s too bad Gregory Johns is so set against public appearances, but even the studio isn’t trying to pressure him.”

“It
is
too bad,” Thorn echoed, but with a kindly tone. “And especially because he
could
tell you just the sort of thing you want. Reams of it. Why, when he was nine or so he started his first book—writing one himself I mean. It was the damnedest plagiarism you ever heard of.” Thorn smiled reminiscently, and the others smiled with him. “The kid lifted not just one plot from one book, but all the plots and all the characters of the entire printed works of Ralph Henry Barbour.”

“Oh, how
darling,
” Mrs. Martin said. “Who was Ralph Henry—”

“And one day,” Thorn went on, warming up to a responsive audience just as he did at the Premium Club, “one day when he was around thirteen or fourteen, he up and departed for New York City—all alone, mind you, this shy gawk of a kid who’d never been anywhere.”

The visit to the editor hypnotized Mrs. Martin. In desperate supplication she begged, “Can’t you persuade him, can’t you possibly persuade him?” She turned to Josh. “Mr. MacQuade, couldn’t you persuade him? This is
just
the sort of thing we’d love!”

“They’re nice yarns, all right,” Josh MacQuade said. He was watching Thorn almost as intently as Mrs. Martin was.

“And the press,” she continued to MacQuade, “
does
cover our author lunches when they’re this important.”

“And there’s one other story,” Thornton said, ignoring the small exchange between the two. “It hasn’t a thing to do with writing, but it’s my favorite story about my brother, just the same.” In anticipation he laughed outright, throwing his head back. His magnificent teeth, not one marred by a filling, inlay, or crown, were all revealed, and his laughter was so loving, so contagious, that Josh and Mrs. Martin laughed too.

“Tell us,” Mrs. Martin urged. “Please!”

“It was at a birthday party of mine, my, let’s see, fifteenth, no, sixteenth birthday party. I had a girl named Janie Hyatt—my first girl—and it was a real grown-up affair. You can imagine
how
grown-up. Well, all of a sudden, out of the blue—”

Thorn mimicked the piping of a little boy’s voice and collapsed, sputtering, while Josh and Mrs. Martin roared. “Going to have a puppy—” Thorn said once more in a dying whisper, and all three laughed again.

“Oh, I could weep,” Mrs. Martin cried. “They’re
wonderful
stories, and you make them so wonderful, the way you tell them!”

“I’ve got a million of them.”

Mrs. Martin’s face went tragic. “I could die,” she said. “I can’t bear to go back empty-handed, now that I have heard them.” She looked at Thorn wistfully. “I wish
you
were your brother. I wonder if you—”

She paused and silence fell upon the room. Josh decided that the look on the face of Thornton Johns was the innocent pleasure of a child who has been good and knows it. I wonder, MacQuade thought, if he
knew
he was going to put it into her mind, or whether blind instinct guides him.

“You wonder if I what?” Thorn asked Mrs. Martin.

“I can’t help wondering,” she said in a rush, “if
you
would address our meeting. You could tell us
about
your brother.”

“Me?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Martin said ecstatically. “People often lecture
about
authors.”

“Horn in on Gregory? Thanks, no.” Thorn spoke indignantly, but his eyes sought MacQuade’s.

“Horning in? You’re being invited on your own. Begged, implored. I could go back and say, well, Mr. Gregory Johns never does, but his good-looking—his clever brother—” She wheeled toward MacQuade. “It’s a new angle, isn’t it, Mr. MacQuade? An author who won’t lecture and a brother who—”

“It
is
a publicity gimmick,” MacQuade said. His eyes were still on Thornton’s face.