The Celebrity (32 page)

Often in the next days, Hat wished they could pull off on the shoulder of the highway, park and lock the car, and take a plane to New York. Eventually they did reach Martin Heights and, no Act of God having disturbed Imperial Century’s schedule, full details about it were waiting for them on Uncle Thorn’s lips. The private showings were to begin on Monday, the twelfth, and take the place of any gala Broadway opening at the Palladium Theater later on; Von Brann didn’t want that kind of fanfare for this picture. On Monday, in the afternoon, Gregory and Abby alone would see it with Harry Von Brann, and after that there would be a showing every night for five nights, to Imperial’s blue-chip list of influential people.

In Hat’s hierarchy of thrills, neither her shopping expeditions to Saks Fifth Avenue’s College Shop nor her reunion with Patrick King could rank with the excitement of accompanying her parents to Imperial Century’s spacious projection room, as large as a newsreel theater, and seeing her father’s name on the screen and hearing words he had written issue forth from the famous lips of her adored Stephen Fields and her adored Jean Singleton. She could scarcely believe that this was she, seated in the midst of people whose names and faces everybody in the world knew, nor that the tall slim man beside her, her own familiar, often unsatisfactory father, was basically responsible for drawing such audiences together. Before the week was out, all the movie critics in town were there, all the columnists, newspaper feature writers, radio and television people who knew everybody, journalists who knew everybody, publishers who knew everybody, visiting producers from other studios, visiting Hollywood stars, local Broadway stars, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Hat went all the time her parents went, except for the first hush-hush afternoon when even Uncle Thorn was excluded. For the real showings in the evenings, Uncle Thorn, of course, was all over the place, best pals with everybody, and Aunt Cindy managed to horn in twice. Daddy did let her invite Pat along, and the instant Pat looked around at the audience, he lost his resentment that she was not saving a single one of her last evenings in New York just to date him.

All week Daddy behaved well; after each showing, after all those great people had applauded the picture like mad, Daddy would forget about being shy and talk to everybody who came up. The movie critics and newspaper people would leap at him first, and make a hoggish circle around him, so it was only in the reception room, coming in or going out, that wonderful things could happen. But there Uncle Thorn or Mr. Von Brann or the New York executives of Imperial Century did introduce them to Gregory Peck and Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle and Bette Davis, whose glorious eyes were still wet over the picture, and to the Quentin Reynoldses and Celeste Holm and Gertrude Lawrence and Bennett and Phyllis Cerf. One evening Oscar Hammerstein came, and Robert Sherwood; another time, Uncle Thorn pointed out Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay and told her that all these famous playwrights belonged to a world government committee and worked awfully hard on it. “Does Daddy know that?” she asked him. “Of course he does, Hat.” It was the only time all week her old disapproval came alive again. Daddy talked often about the dull people who were for world government, even dead ones like Wendell Willkie and Nicholas Murray Butler, but he never once had told her that the idea made sense to terrific successful people like these. Maybe there was something to it after all.

When Gregory Johns saw
The Good World
for the first time, he wept. Except for Abby, Von Brann, and himself, the projection room was empty. They sat well back, tiers and tiers of empty seats before them. Even before the ceiling lights dimmed far above them, they did not speak.

The light receded; Gregory sat rigid. In the darkness, as the first bar of a thin troubled music drifted through the air, as the first beams from the projector hit the screen, there came not the traditional opening, not Imperial Century Studios Presents, not the names of the stars, not the title, not Screenplay By, Directed By, Produced By—

Nothing at first but a world of desolation sweeping across the screen; cities half crushed, spires fallen, forests blackened and blown, rivers-and ports emptied of ships.

Nothing after that but a .laborer walking down an empty street, a woman and child in a tumbled doorway, a Red Cross ambulance careening around a corner.

A narrator’s voice came gravely across the music. “It is Sunday morning. Three months have gone by since the end of the Fifth Atomic War. Ninety million people were killed in twenty hours and the rest of mankind is still afraid.”

Suddenly then, across the entire screen, came

THE GOOD WORLD

and Gregory’s eyes filled and his ribs could not contain his heart.

The “cards,” as he had learned to call them in Hollywood, now appeared in due and hallowed sequence; they were a dancing brightness, he could not read them.

Beside him, Abby took his arm, but he could not turn to her. Harry Von Brann lighted a cigarette; the flame was like a sword. The empty seats were a cause for love. Today he could not have borne it if he had had to speak, smile, give an opinion of this that his book had become.

Not one of the three theaters in Freeton would show
The Good World
until November, and old Geraldine was furious. She went and talked to the manager of the Main personally; he assured her he was as. sorry as she. “Not till it’s off Broadway,” he said. “We never get a quick shot at the real big ones.”

On opening day at the Palladium, Gerald couldn’t leave the store because Hiram was sick; Geraldine, and Fan Heston went to New York without him. They took an early train, but even at eleven in the morning, the line waiting for the box office to open went clear around the block to Sixth Avenue.

At first Geraldine couldn’t understand, why Gregory was so crazy about the picture, and the critics too. She and Fan were surprised at the queer opening, and, though neither of them said so, disappointed. The book hadn’t begun that way; Geraldine had expected to see Stephen Fields looking at a television wristwatch and a calendar that said 2000. But when the action and the dialogue began, she cheered up, and so did Fan, and soon they began to enjoy it as much as anybody else. There was a hope to it, under all the sophisticated talk and humor; it really made you believe the time would come—

When Gregory’s name came on, after that silly backward way the film began, Geraldine was furious. The title of the book was in letters as large as houses, but Gregory’s name was small, down at the bottom of the screen; it hardly stayed on long enough to read. At least it didn’t say “Based on” or “Adapted from.” It
did
say, “By Gregory Johns.”

“I should hope so,” Geraldine said aloud and a man next her shot a quick annoyed look in her direction. She wanted to turn to him and say, “My son wrote it,” she wanted to scream it aloud so the whole theater would hear. All the way through she sat there wanting to, and at the end she could have kissed all the people who burst into applause. She wanted to talk to everybody, she wanted to stand on a seat and shout, she wanted to cry.

She shushed Fan on the way out so she could hear everything said around her. Only one man said anything nasty. “Capitalist malarkey,” he called it, and she wished she could follow him and turn him right in to the F.B.I. If there was anything that came out clearer for her in the movie than it had been in the book, it was just that, about those Russians. They could veto everything they wanted about world government, right up to the time there was one, but then if they were the only ones out of it, they’d be like people without passports, or criminals who had lost their citizenship, or businessmen with no customers. “I just hope it doesn’t take five more wars, Fan,” she said. Fan shuddered but didn’t answer. Fan was still obeying the Shush.

But once they were out on the street, Fan began to chatter and whir like an eggbeater. Fan’s face was red, her hat was crooked, she would stop in the middle of the street and say, “Oh, and that scene where—” and start describing it as if Geraldine hadn’t seen the picture at all. “I can’t wait to get back home,” Fan said, “and tell everybody.”

A small pang, like a stitch, shot through Geraldine’s side.

That was a cruel thing for Fan to do, rubbing it in. Once it would have been Geraldine who told everybody, before the change, before the conspiracy. It was just like a conspiracy, except that it hadn’t started all at once. It had just crept up, and last week, when she tried to arrange a big party to go to New York to the Palladium, Fan Heston was the only one who would go.

It was then Geraldine had realized that something had been going on behind her back for weeks and weeks and weeks. Scarcely a soul in Freeton, except the Hestons, had dropped in or even phoned, and when she did meet the Markhams on the street, or the McGills or the Antons or the Smiths or the Garsons, and start to tell them about the bestseller list or the total sales, they would stand there as if they were worried about the parking-meter running out.

Once she had asked Gerald about it and he had passed it off heartlessly. “I was getting all worn out from all those parties, and so were you. Anyway, at the store, business is hotter than ever.” And now here was Fan being heartless too.

“Shall we, Deeny? I’ll treat,” Fan said.

“Shall we what?”

“Have some of these hot doughnuts and coffee? The smell is killing me.”

Geraldine looked around her. They were at a large plate-glass window, behind which great shining machines were spilling forth golden doughnuts. The smell of baking always cheered you, Geraldine thought, and she made for the revolving door. Inside, as they squeezed into two tight little chairs behind a table no bigger than a breadboard, a vast humanity entered Geraldine’s heart. Fan couldn’t help rushing right out to the Markhams and McGills and Antons, and telling them about the picture and the line around the block and the bursting applause. It was just human nature. If Fan wanted to batten off her fame, why, it was perfectly all right with her.

If Geraldine Johns had waited for the Palladium’s afternoon show that day, she might have seen her daughters Gloria and Georgia and Gracia standing in line for tickets, and her daughter-in-law Lucinda taking two guests in on passes.

Since Cindy had been to two previews, she was not aquiver to see the picture again, but it was wonderful to have so fine a reason for asking Maude Denkin and Nell Abbott to lunch. Without the official passes, they might have thought her pushy to call them; as it was, it had gone off perfectly. She’d felt marvelous, going in with them under that great marquee shouting
The Good World
at all of Broadway, and besides she liked just sitting there between them, half watching the picture, half letting her mind drift.

Thorn had arranged with the Publicity Office of Imperial Century to get as many passes as he needed, and she had asked him not to throw them around too casually. After that dreary summer in Quogue, she had explained, she was going to do a lot of entertaining—

Cindy smiled and leaned luxuriously back into the wide loge seat. Whenever she said “dreary summer” or the equivalent, Thorn promptly acquiesced to whatever the phrase had prefaced. At least while Jill Goodwyn had been in town, he certainly had. Like any wife, Cindy had let him stew about what she knew and what she didn’t; it would have been madness to admit she didn’t know anything and that she would have swallowed it if she had. Ever since that smash triumph of his at the Waldorf and ever since he had let her in on the secret that he was going to make a lot of money from a spring lecture tour as well as from Hathaway-Johns, Inc., she had actually found it easy to avoid an open break about Jill Goodwyn or anything else. Those tabloid pictures had nearly tripped her, but she had caught herself just in time.

And such good sense was paying oft, as it always did. This month Thorn had doubled the money for running the house; he hadn’t carried on much about the new draperies and rug for the living room; this morning he had said, “Of course, engraved;” when she had asked him about the cards.

It seemed crazy to order Christmas cards so far in advance, but she had never waited beyond October 1st, even with the cheap printed ones they had always sent out. This morning she had shown Thorn the stack of their old ones; she always kept a sample, so there wouldn’t be duplication, and she had run through about ten for him, going back before the war. Thorn had agreed they looked garish and cheap; that kind of thing wouldn’t go now, he had said. This year they’d be sending a card to everybody they had met in Hollywood, to all the possible clients of the Hathaway-Johns Agency, to dozens of movie critics and journalists and publishers and columnists and Heaven knew who all. “Go ahead and order something good. Let me check your list first.”

The moment he’d left for the office, she had begun on the names. The old list, Thorn’s clients and the family and their old friends, was in a cubbyhole at the right of her desk; she could put her hand on that in five minutes. But the new list had occupied half the morning. Making it had excited and thrilled her—it was a kind of shorthand record of the fabulous year they’d just had. No wonder she had finally had the brainstorm about what the card should say!

All the while she’d been adding names to the list, her mind had been searching for something original, something clever and witty and, above all, smart. No Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, no Best Wishes for the Holiday Season, none of those middle-class things the stores showed you in catalogues. Not this year, thank you. She’d design one herself, and write out the message herself, and then it would be right. It would be the kind that opened like a book, with a decoration or picture on the cover and the engraved words inside. She remembered one they had received last year from the investment broker, Bryson Goodhue. A well-known artist had done an etching of the Goodhue town house on Fifth Avenue, and the whole card had breathed wealth and elegance the moment you opened the envelope.

She had put the Goodhue card out of her mind and begun making sketches and writing out phrases; two minutes later her brainstorm had happened and she’d taken some of her best note paper and put the whole thing down.