The Dream Merchants (33 page)

I looked at Doris and she started to come in with me. The nurse put a hand on her arm. “One at a time please.”

Doris smiled at me and stepped back. “Go in, Johnny,” she said, “I’ve already seen him once this morning and I know he wants to see you.”

I shut the door quietly behind me. Peter was lying on the bed, his head propped up by two pillows. He was very still and at first I thought he was asleep, for he didn’t move. His face was very white and thin and his eyes were sunken deep into his cheekbones. Then slowly he turned his head toward me and opened his eyes. He smiled.

“Johnny.” His voice sounded pleased even if it was faint.

I walked over to the bed and stood there looking at him.

His eyes looked up at me. They were bright and alive in his face even if he was weak. He made a slight gesture with his hand. “Johnny.” There was no mistaking the pleasure in his voice now. It was a little stronger.

I took his hand and sat down in a chair next to the bed. His hand felt thin and I could feel the bones of it as he moved his fingers. I still couldn’t speak.

“Johnny, I’ve been a fool,” he said, his eyes looking into mine.

Everything inside me seemed to fill up and overflow as he spoke. “No more than me, Peter.” My voice sounded strangely harsh in the still room.

He smiled wanly. “We seem to spend our lives making mistakes, which we spend our lives trying to make up for.”

I couldn’t answer. I just sat there holding his hand. Slowly his eyes closed and I thought he was asleep. I sat there quietly, afraid to move for fear I would disturb him. His hand was still in mine. I looked down at it. I could see a small blue vein throbbing on its back, over his fingers. I watched it fascinated. It seemed to swell slowly and then go down slowly.

His voice made me look up. The question startled me. “How’s business, Johnny?” he asked. His eyes were bright and interested. For a moment it was almost like old times. It was his favorite question, the one he generally asked before anything else. The first of three. The second and third were “How’s collections?” and “How’s the bank balance?”

Before I knew it I was telling him. About George’s deal to take the terrible ten. About Ronsen’s squeeze to get Farber’s million bucks. I left out all reference to the reasons why Ronsen and I differed.

As I spoke, color came back into his face and he looked more like the Peter of old. He didn’t interrupt me, just listened, and when I finished, he seemed to settle back against the pillows with a sigh.

I looked at him anxiously. I was afraid I had tired him. But I didn’t have to be. Hearing about the business seemed to act like a tonic to him. After a few seconds he spoke. His voice was a little firmer.

“They got no guts, Johnny, no guts,” he said slowly, a slight smile playing around the corner of his mouth. “It looked very good to them, all they had to do to make money was turn out some pictures and issue some stock. But now when they’re up against it, like we have been so many times, they’re frightened. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for somebody or something to save them.” He turned his face to me. There was a real smile on his lips now. His eyes were bright on mine. “They can’t win, Johnny, if we don’t let them. We let their money frighten us once, but we know better now. Money never made any difference in the picture business. It was the pictures that turned the trick. And that’s where we got them. We can make the pictures and they can’t.”

The door behind me opened and the nurse came in. She bustled importantly over to the bedside. She picked up his wrist and felt for his pulse. She held it a moment and looked at me reproachfully. “You’ll have to leave now, Mr. Edge. Mr. Kessler must get some rest.”

I smiled at Peter and got to my feet. I turned and walked to the door. His voice stopped me before I went out. I looked back at the bed.

“Come and see me again tomorrow, Johnny,” he said.

I looked at the nurse. She nodded her head. I smiled back at him. “Sure, Peter, sure. I’ll let you know how things are going.”

He smiled and let his head sink back against the pillow. The nurse took a thermometer and put it in his mouth. A cigar would have looked more natural there, I thought incongruously as I left the room.

Doris was waiting in the hall. “How is he?” she asked.

I grinned at her. “You know,” I replied, “I think he wants to go back to work.” I lit a cigarette thoughtfully and added: “It might not be such a bad idea at that. It might do us both some good.”

And all the time I kept thinking. Back there in his room I hadn’t said anything that was important. Nothing about how I felt about him, how I felt about us. The things that men can feel toward one another after having spent most of their lives together. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Was the only thing we could talk about, the only thing we had in common, after all these years, the picture company?

***

I walked into the big dining room a little after one o’clock. The place was filled with people on their lunch hour. The air was filled with smoke and talk. I could feel eyes watching me as I walked through the main dining room to the smaller dining room. It was called the Sun Room. The sign over the doorway read: “All tables reserved.” It was a warning for the small fry to stay out. This was a room for the top echelon only.

My table was in an alcove, raised a little higher than the rest of the room. Behind it were three wide windows that looked over the studio. It was empty as I walked to it. I looked at Ronsen’s table as I passed. It was empty too. I sat down and the waitress came up.

She smiled at me. “Good afternoon, Mr. Edge.”

“Hello, Ginny,” I answered. “What’s good for lunch?”

“The sweetbreads,” she answered, “sautéed. Just the way you like ’em.”

“Sold,” I told her.

She went away and I looked around the room. Gordon was just coming in. He saw me at the table and began to make his way toward me. I waved him to a chair. “Hello, Robert,” I said.

He plumped himself into the chair heavily. “Scotch old-fashioned, dry, no sugar,” he said to Ginny, who hovered next to him. He looked at me. “I need a drink.”

I smiled at him. “I’ve heard those words before.”

“You’ll hear them a lot more before this picnic is over,” he said. “Farber’s on the lot already, making like a big shot.”

I didn’t answer.

He looked at me. Ginny put his drink before him. He picked it up and finished it in one draught. “I thought you weren’t going to give him an in,” he said flatly.

“I changed my mind.”

“Why?” he asked. “I thought you didn’t want him. Yesterday—”

I cut in on him. “I still don’t want him. But a million bucks is a million bucks. It saves a lot of trouble.”

“It can also make a lot of trouble,” he said sarcastically. “Ronsen, Farber, and Roth were in to see me this morning. They say it’s all set for Dave to take over on
The Snow Queen
. They said it was okay with you.”

The Snow Queen
was the biggest picture we had working at the time. It was a musical starring a kid that Gordon had gone to a lot of trouble to steal from Borden. She was only fourteen years old, but Bob had worked hard on her already. She had a voice like a mature woman’s. Bob had planted her on a radio program featuring one of the biggest comedians and she had made a big hit. He had spent a lot of dough screwing up her tests at Borden and fixing it that they would drop her option. The minute he got her, he had gone to work. He had whipped up a story for her, and from the script we knew it had that intangible something that spelled hit before it came out. It wouldn’t cost us a hell of a lot to make either, and already we sensed the dough coming in. It was his pet project, and now that everything was set to roll, all the glory would go to Dave if he took over. I didn’t blame Bob for being sore.

Bob was on his second old-fashioned before I spoke. “That’s interesting,” I said casually.

He almost choked on his drink. “That’s all you got to say?” he asked.

I nodded my head.

His face went red and he started to get up from the table.

I grinned at him. “Sit down, sit down. Keep your shirt on. I’m not letting anybody screw you. We’ll let Dave get associate-producer credit if we have to, but it will still be a Robert Gordon production.”

“That ain’t the way I heard it,” he said indignantly.

“That’s the way it’s gonna be, an’ if they don’t like it, they can go hump ’emselves.”

He settled back in his chair. He sipped slowly at his drink now, his face was thoughtful. “Got an angle, Johnny?” he asked.

That was Hollywood too. Everything had to have an angle. You could get a guy to hang himself with pleasure if he thought he was in on an angle to screw somebody he didn’t like.

“A million-dollar angle,” I said smiling.

He was smiling now. “I should have known better, Johnny. I’m sorry for blowing my top.”

“Forget it, Bob,” I said generously. I could afford to be generous. I wasn’t giving anything away.

“What’s the gimmick?” he asked, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone.

I looked around the room and lowered my voice to match his. The best actors in this business weren’t always on the screen. There was more acting in every minute of our end of the business than went on in a year before the cameras. “This is no place to talk about it, Bob,” I said softly. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He was completely happy now. He looked around the room expansively. He even smiled and nodded to some people. His every gesture exuded confidence. It was amazing how that changed the atmosphere in the room.

Before this, people had been talking quietly, looking at us apprehensively out of the corners of their eyes. They were wondering whether we’d still be their bosses tomorrow. They were already making plans in case we weren’t. New people had to be cultivated, flattered, new asses to be kissed. Maybe new jobs would have to be found by some. But now, from the way Gordon looked, most of them figured they were good for a while.

I looked over Gordon’s head to the doorway. Ronsen, Farber, and Roth were standing there. Ronsen caught my eye and started toward me. He and Farber walked together, his hand most deferentially on Farber’s arm. Dave brought up the rear like a puppy trailing after its masters.

Watching them, I almost smiled. Peter was right. I looked at Ronsen. His every action indicated solicitude for Farber.

Ronsen had changed a little since he had first muscled his way into the place. He was confident then. I remember what he said: “The trouble with this business is that there is too much dependence on personalities and too little faith in the good old American principles of running a business. There need be no such conditions. It’s very simple, really. The studio is nothing but a factory. All they have to do is make pictures and have them marketed properly. That’s my job here. To show the picture business how it should be run. Before I get finished with this place it will run like the Ford Motor Company.”

I almost laughed aloud when I thought of that. The Ford Motor Company. He took a leaf right out of their books and the first thing he tried to do was break our contracts with the unions. He almost broke us instead. For nine weeks not a picture rolled on our lot. He had raged up and down the place, yelling: “Communistic labor principles.” It didn’t do any good. Then, in the last week of the strike, when the projectionists across the country refused to run a single Magnum picture in their theaters and we were faced with a complete loss of revenue, he finally gave in and I had to go out and straighten up the mess.

Peter was right. In the final analysis they had to come back to us. Maybe it was because we had nothing to lose and they had everything. We were broke when we started. We could afford to go out broke if we had to. We knew that the business was built upon a hypothecation, a gamble. We knew that every picture we turned out was a gamble, and like gamblers we were not satisfied to wait for the results of one bet. Before that picture was out we bet that it was good and hocked it against another picture, another gamble, and kept on going.

That was something they couldn’t afford to do. They came to us with pockets loaded, with money that they had had for years, that their fathers had had before them, and if they lost that their world was at an end and there was nothing left for them.

They had to come to us.

I stood up as they neared my table. I looked at Stanley. The years had changed him but little. He was still the same guy. Maybe his hair had gone gray, his face had filled out along with his stomach, but he still had the same ready smile that lacked warmth. His eyes still gave the impression that they were constantly adding and subtracting. He hadn’t changed much. I still reacted to him the same way I had when I first met him. He rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t like him.

Larry spoke first. “Hello, Johnny,” he said in that deep voice of his that carried to every corner of the room. “You know Stanley, don’t you?”

Every eye in the room was on us. I smiled and held out my hand. “Sure,” I said, “recognize him anywhere.” He took my hand. It was still the same old handshake—just like picking up a dead fish. “How are yuh, boy?” I continued. “Glad to see yuh.”

His face was a little pale under its ruddy color, but his eye had an unmistakable glint of triumph in it. “Johnny,” he said, “it’s been years.”

He let go my hand and we stood there smiling at each other. To all outward appearances we were buddies who had just seen each other after a long while. And all the time we would have gladly cut each other’s throat if there was any way we could get away with it.

“Sit down, gentlemen.” I waved them to the chairs.

There were only four places at my table. Since Bob and I were already seated, there were only two more places. Larry dropped into the chair on my right and Stanley seated himself heavily on my left. That left Dave standing up and looking for a place to sit.

Ginny saw him standing there and made a motion to get a chair for him; but I caught her eye. She stopped and, half smothering a smile, turned and went toward the kitchen.

Dave stood there uncomfortably for a moment looking for someone to bring him a chair. He looked at me helplessly. I smiled up at him. “Grab yourself a chair, son,” I said pleasantly, “and sit down.” I turned to the others, still smiling. “I don’t know what’s the matter with these waitresses. They’re never around when you want them.”