The Dream Merchants (21 page)

“What does it say?” Peter asked Johnny. He still refused to wear glasses.

“Hollywood,” Johnny answered. “I guess this is where the Santos place is.”

“It’s just down the road a piece,” the driver ventured.

Peter looked around him. “California,” he said in a disgusted tone of voice.

Johnny looked at him.

Peter was muttering to himself. “No shooting script. Cost twenty-five hundred dollars. No leading man. Cost six thousand dollars.” He sniffed the air. It was filled with the scent of orange blossoms. “Phooey!” he said aloud.

Johnny began to smile.

Peter became aware that he had been overheard. He smiled in spite of himself.

“What am I supposed to make a picture with?” he asked, holding out a hand and pointing. “Oranges?”

AFTERMATH

1938

WEDNESDAY

I looked at my wristwatch. It was almost five o’clock. The gray of the morning was slowly turning to gold. I turned to Doris, “Isn’t it about time you tried to get some sleep, sweetheart?”

Her eyes were dark blue and shadowed. “I’m not sleepy,” she answered, but the lines in her face belied her words.

“Yuh gotta get some rest, baby,” I said. “You can’t keep this up forever.”

She looked at me. A faint shadow of a smile flickered across her face for a moment and was gone. Her voice was lightly mocking as she answered: “You tired, Johnny?”

It was an old joke of the family’s. It had started a long time ago when Peter used to come into the studio at almost any hour of the day or night and used to find me there.

“Johnny never sleeps,” he used to say, laughing. “He’s got money in the bank.”

I smiled at her. “A little,” I admitted, “but you’re the one that needs the rest. Things are tough enough around here without you falling flat on your face.”

The smile on her face bloomed; its warmth spilled over into her eyes. “All right, Uncle Johnny,” she said in a small girl’s voice, “but you’ll promise to come and see me tomorrow?”

I caught her to me and held her close. “Tomorrow and every day the rest of my life when this is over, if you want it.”

Her voice was rich in my ear and full of promise as she answered: “I never wanted anything else, Johnny.”

I kissed her. I liked the way she held my face close to hers, her hands cupping the back of my ears and extending round the back of my head. Her touch was light, yet firm with the knowledge of an old passion. I liked the soft touch of her face against mine, the light smell of perfume that rose from her neck and shoulders, the crinkling soft sound that her hair made when I stroked it.

She stepped back and looked at me for a moment, then she took my hand and we walked into the hall. Silently she helped me into my topcoat and watched me put on my hat; then we walked to the door.

At the door I turned and faced her. “Now you go right upstairs and get some sleep,” I said sternly.

She gave a small laugh and kissed me. “Johnny, you’re sweet.”

“I can be mean too,” I said, still trying to keep my voice stern, but not quite succeeding, “and if you—”

“If I don’t go up to bed, you’ll spank me like you did once,” she said with a mischievous smile.

“I never did,” I protested.

“Oh yes you did,” she insisted with the same smile still on her lips. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me speculatively. “I wonder if you would if you were angry enough. It might be fun, at that.”

I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her away from me. I pushed her toward the stairs and gave her a light pat on the rump as I did so. “I’ll beat you with a stick if you don’t go right to bed,” I told her.

She went halfway toward the stairs and then she turned around and looked at me.

I looked back at her silently.

At last she spoke; her voice was serious. “Never leave me, Johnny,” she said.

For some reason I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. My throat was all knotted up and I couldn’t find my voice. Something in her voice, in its small, quiet sound, in its loneliness and patience, seemed to go deep inside me. Then the words seemed to come from me by themselves. I didn’t form them in my mind, I didn’t make them in my throat, I didn’t even seem to say them with my lips; they just seemed to come from within me by themselves and build a bridge between us that no distance could ever break.

“Never no more, sweetheart.”

Not an expression on her face seemed to change, but a glow came from within her, and its warmth reached out and held me close across the room. For a moment she stood there; then she turned and started up the stairs.

I watched her go. Her step was light and easy and she moved with the quiet grace of a dancer. At the top of the stairs she looked down and blew a kiss to me.

I waved to her and she went down the hall and out of sight. I turned and let myself out the front door.

The sky was bright and the air was cool. The dew on the flowers sparkled in the slanting rays of the early morning sun. Suddenly I wasn’t tired. My weariness had left me with the first deep breath of the morning air. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes after five, too late to go home to sleep.

I picked up a cab two blocks from the house. “To Magnum Studios,” I told the driver as I settled back against the cushions and lit up a cigarette.

The studio was only fifteen minutes from Peter’s home. I paid the driver and walked toward the gate. It was locked. I pressed the bell button on the right wall and waited for the watchman to come.

I could see the light flicker as a shadow moved in front of it in the gateman’s cabin a few feet beyond the gate. The door opened and he came out toward me.

He saw me through the gate and recognized me. Almost imperceptibly his step quickened until he was almost running. He opened the gate. “Mr. Edge,” he said, “I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”

“It’s a surprise visit,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be back myself.”

He closed the gate behind me. “Anything I can do, Mr. Edge?”

“No, thanks,” I said, “I’m going up to my office.”

I walked down the long street to the administration building. The studio was quiet and I could hear the sound of my footsteps echoing hollowly behind me as I walked. The chippies woke up as I walked past them and began to chirp in the trees. They resented anyone coming in early. I smiled to myself, remembering the sound from the long years behind me. They always chirped when I would get to the studio early.

The watchman at the administration building was waiting for me as I reached it. He stood there in the doorway, sleep still showing in his eyes. The gateman must have called and told him I was on the way up. “Good morning, Mr. Edge,” he said.

“Good morning,” I replied, walking through the door.

He hurried down the hall in front of me and opened the door of my office with his key. “Is there anything I can get you, Mr. Edge?” he asked—“some coffee or something?”

“No, thanks,” I replied. I sniffed the air. It was dull and dead in the office.

He saw my gesture and rushed past me to the windows and opened them. “Some fresh air in here won’t hurt, sir,” he said.

I smiled and thanked him and he left. He seemed almost to back out the door as he shut it carefully behind him. I took off my topcoat and hat and put them in the little closet. I felt like a drink; it had been a long night.

I walked through the side door in my office. Between my office and Gordon’s was a little kitchen. A refrigerator, pantry, and small electric stove were in there. A coffee pot stood on the stove. I touched it; it was still warm. The watchman must have made himself some coffee, I thought. I opened the refrigerator and took out a small bottle of ginger ale and carried it back to my office.

I took a bottle of bourbon out of my desk and a glass from the small table behind it. I put two fingers of liquor in the glass and then poured ginger ale over it until the glass was almost half full. I tasted it. It was just right. I drank almost half of it and then walked over to the window and looked out.

The sky was brighter now and I could see almost to the back lot. The writers’ building was almost directly behind ours, and the other executive buildings fanned out to the right and left of it, making a sort of crescent around the administration building. Behind the writers’ building was sound stage number one.

Sound stage number one. I smiled to myself as I thought of it. It was a new building, all white and modern and fireproof. The first stage that Peter and I had opened was more of a barn than a building. It was a rambling structure with four walls and no ceiling so the sun could shine through. There was a big tarpaulin top that we used to stretch over it at the first sign of rain. I remembered how we used to have a man always sitting on a little platform near the top of the building, scanning the skies.

The rain-watcher we used to call him. In case rain threatened he would yell down and the tarpaulin would be rigged in a hurry. We used to leave it off almost until the last possible minute because the mercury vapor lamps we used for indoor lighting used to cost so much money.

Joe Turner had thought of it. When we had figured out how expensive the lamps were to use, he suggested: “Why don’t we put a circus top on the building? Then when it rains we can just cover it up.”

Joe had been dead almost twenty years now, but there were some things about him that were as fresh and vivid in my mind as if I had seen him each day of those two decades. I could still remember his booming laugh as he told the story of how we got the land for the studio for nothing. It was his favorite story. I smiled to myself as I looked across the forty acres that made up the studio today. It hadn’t cost us a cent of our own money.

It was after I had come back to New York with the first print of
The Bandit
. Peter couldn’t come to New York as the judgment against him that was held by the combine was still unsettled. The first showing was held at the screening rooms of Bill Borden’s studios. The independents were growing a little braver as Fox’s suit against the combine seemed more certain of success each day.

The screening room was crowded. All the important states’ rights distributors were there in addition to an already large list of our creditors. I don’t know who was more enthusiastic about the picture, the distributors who were clamoring to buy it or our creditors, who were beginning to entertain visions of getting their money back and maybe a little profit too.

I don’t think any of us really expected in our wildest dreams the events that followed. Within two hours after I had screened the picture I had collected almost forty thousand dollars in deposits from the distributors against the showing of the picture. Borden, standing at my side as each distributor pressed me to accept his check for his territory, kept saying over and over to himself: “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.”

By midnight I was talking to Peter on the phone. I was so excited I stuttered. “We got forty thousand dollars, Peter,” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

His voice was thin and crackly as it came through the receiver. “What did you say, Johnny?” he asked. “It sounded like forty thousand dollars.”

“That’s right,” I shouted, “forty thousand dollars! They loved the picture!”

There was a silence at the other end of the phone, then his voice came through doubtfully: “Where are you, Johnny?”

“At Borden’s studio,” I answered.

“Is Willie there?” he asked.

“He’s standing right next to me,” I said.

“Let me talk to him,” Peter said.

I handed the phone over to Borden.

“Hello, Peter,” Borden said into the mouthpiece, “
mazel tov
!”

I could hear Peter’s voice crackling at the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Borden turned and looked at me, a half smile on his lips.

He waited until Peter had finished talking. His smile grew broader as he turned back to the phone. “No,” he said, “Johnny hasn’t had a drink all night. He’s as sober as I am.” There was a few seconds’ silence while Peter spoke, then Borden spoke again: “Yeah, forty thousand dollars. I seen the checks with my own eyes!”

Peter’s voice crackled again and Borden handed the phone back to me. “Didn’t you believe me?” I asked.

“Believe you?” Peter’s voice was full and happy. “My boy, my own ears I didn’t believe. Forty thousand dollars!”

“I’ll transfer the money to you in the morning,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “Transfer half of it to me so I could pay off Al the twenty thousand dollars I owe him. The other half you use to pay off our notes in New York.”

“But, Peter, that will leave us broke again. We owe almost twenty here and we’ll need money to make the next picture.”

“If I pay off the money I owe for this picture,” he said, “I can sleep easy for one night. Tomorrow I will worry about getting money for the next one.”

“But what about money for a studio? We can’t keep working on a farm all the time. Pay off half now; they’ll be glad to wait for the rest of it. This picture looks like it will gross a quarter of a million dollars and they know it.”

“If it grosses that much we can afford to pay them now,” Peter said.

“But we’ll have to wait almost a year for the money,” I protested. Under the states’ rights method of distribution we were entitled to get our money six months after the release of the picture by the distributor. “What will we do until then? Sit around on our behinds and wait? We can’t afford to wait now!”

Peter’s voice was firm. “Pay the money like I said. One good night’s sleep I’m getting out of this!”

I knew I was licked. When that stubborn tone crept into Peter’s voice, standing on my head wouldn’t change his mind. “All right, Peter.”

His voice lightened. “They liked the picture, hah?”

“They were crazy about it,” I told him, “especially that gun fight where the sheriff and the bandit shoot it out in the parlor of the girl’s house.” I knew that would please him, it was his idea. In the play the shooting took place in a big saloon, but we didn’t have the money to build a set like that, so Peter switched to the girl’s parlor.

He laughed. “I told you it was more dramatic that way, didn’t I?”