West of Sunset (15 page)

“I'm writing your new picture.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling as if he'd cleared up a mystery, and wagged a finger at him like a teacher. “Two things. I never die in my pictures, and I never, ever lose my man. Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“I am,” he said, though he was already well behind schedule.

He expected Stromberg to check on his progress, but the only memo he received had to do with the censors. Ever since the announcement in
Variety
, the Legion of Decency had been petitioning the Hays Office to do something. To placate them, Stromberg was changing the title to
Fidelity
.

“Smart,” Oppy said.

“He'll have to do more than that to get it by them,” Dottie said.

“There's a tasteful kiss,” Scott said. “That's it.”

“Tasteful's worse, actually,” she said. “The guy's cheating on his wife. If you make him a heel, maybe, but then he's got to come to a bad end. So does she.”

“It woulda passed in the good old days,” Oppy said, meaning five years ago, before the Code.

“I'll be surprised if L.B. goes for it,” Alan said. “It sounds more like something Warner's would do.”

Stromberg told him not to worry. Scott saw it as a challenge—irresistible, really—but as he blocked out the first act, he kept in mind Mayer's puritanical streak, and second-guessed his effects, doubling back, working slower and slower till he was nibbling at the stage directions when he needed to be bashing out scenes.

Late one afternoon as he was fixing a playful exchange between Myrna Loy and the husband, Dottie burst in without knocking, Alan at her heels. They gathered close about his desk, whispered as if someone might hear them through the vents. They'd just seen the Nazi in the elevator.

The car was going up, and stopped to let a messenger off. The Nazi stayed on, headed for the fourth floor.

“I'll bet he's come to watch your dailies,” Dottie said.

“Already,” Scott said, since they'd only begun shooting.

“He knows what he's looking for,” Alan said. “He's had the script since you turned it in.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Just hope it's Mank that's showing him,” she said. “He may be a dumb son of a bitch, but he's still a Jew.”

“Unlike L.B.,” Alan said, “who's a Jeunuch.”

“You know his secretary,” she said, pointing to the phone. “See if he's in.”

Scott hesitated, wondering why she couldn't call, and then felt cowardly. He thought of Ernest during the air raid, bumping his head.

Mank's secretary verified it. They were headed over to the projection room.

“Come on,” Dottie said, and raced down the hall to their office, which faced Main Street. There, below, crossing the broad, palm-lined plaza toward the commissary, Mank and the man called Reinecke were engaged in conversation, Mank gesticulating with both hands. Scott's first thought was that the German was older, and slight—hardly a threat. He wore a bowler and a black suit like a Charing Cross banker, and carried a briefcase, the contents of which Scott ridiculously imagined included top secret documents and a gun.

As they neared the newsstand, Mank stopped Reinecke to make a point. The German tossed his head back and laughed, and Mank patted his shoulder like an old friend.

“First rule of business,” Dottie said. “Start 'em off with a joke.”

They turned the corner of the payroll office and disappeared. Scott thought she might want him to shadow them like a detective, sneaking into the booth to eavesdrop, but she had a simpler solution: call Harry the projectionist and have him hold on to the cans.

“I take it you've been doing this a while.”

“We like to know what's going on.”

“Not that it does any good,” Alan said.

“Don't be naive, darling. The most important thing in the world is knowing who's on your side. Isn't that right, Scott?”

She turned a feline smile on him, and what could he do but agree?

They broke up, going back to work, though now he couldn't concentrate.

They reconvened after Mank's secretary tipped them. It was a quarter to six. In the shady alleys between soundstages, grips and day players loitered, waiting for the siren. Dottie cut through the production office and out the back, as if they were being followed.

Harry had propped open the side door for them. He was grandfatherly, gaunt and bald as a light bulb, and wore a vest like a Wild West barkeep. Scott knew him from watching Joan Crawford's catalog, though they'd barely spoken. He was one of those studio functionaries who resented any attempt at chit-chat. Alan gave him five bucks for staying late, and like moguls, they took the front row.

The lights died, the projector whirred, and the screen glowed white. A numbered header snaked past, replaced by a chalk-marked slate, the lens racking, pulling focus. Though he'd worked on it for months, seeing the title made the film suddenly real, and for an instant he was inordinately proud. The clapper boy snapped down the gate and stepped out of frame, revealing the interior of Alfonso's Café.

The scene was an early one between Robert Taylor and Margaret Sullavan. He and his two mechanic friends had raced her rich boyfriend's Buick on the way to town and beaten it with their jalopy, and now, while the others were carousing in the background, Taylor was making a play for her. The tone was light, Sullavan breezily parrying each advance, which only made him want her more. Scott had brought his script to see if they'd changed anything. There was only one line that might be objectionable. Of the three veterans, Erich was the rugged, apolitical one, but she purposefully confused him with Franchot Tone's crusading Communist. The dig was: “You're the one who was so upset about the state of the country.”

“You're the one who was so upset about the state of the country,” she said.

It was all there exactly as Scott had written it.

“For now,” Dottie said. “Make a note. The bastard wasn't here for his health.”

The next scene also took place in the café, though it came much later in the script. They'd probably shot them all at once, using the same set-up. Franchot Tone was telling Sullavan that Erich needed her more than he did. It was a speech Scott and Paramore had battled over, and as it played out before him on the screen, with a creeping sense of disbelief he realized the whole thing had been rewritten. They hadn't kept a single line of his.

“Son of a bitch.”

“That's Mank,” Dottie said, as if he should have expected it.

“He's still the good guy though,” Alan said. “Comrade Franchot.”

“That's exactly what they'll want changed,” she said. “The Communist can't be the hero.”

“Then they'll have to change a lot,” Scott said. “Especially the ending.”

The next scene had been gutted as well, and the next, just stray scraps of dialogue left.

“Christ, why does he even need a script?”

“Welcome to Hollywood,” Dottie said.

“And this is the raw stuff,” Alan said. “Wait till they cut it.”

The prospect made him wish he'd never seen the footage. Now he felt truly powerless, and the next day struggled to make headway on
Fidelity
. To catch up he took it home, working at the kitchen table until the rest of the Garden had gone to bed. He brought it to Sheilah's for the weekend, stealing a few hours Sunday afternoon. He was going to make himself sick, she predicted, and as if she'd jinxed him, he did.

It started as a cough, a dry catch at the back of his throat and then a hollow racking that left him gasping and teary, his lungs tight. He blamed the dampness, fashioning an ascot from a hand towel to wear around the house, as he had that wet summer in Baltimore when he was trying to finish his novel and Zelda, out of her mind, set the place on fire. He was certain it was a recurrence of his TB, the beginning of the inevitable weakening, his only recourse, like Stevenson or Lawrence before him, a desert sanitarium, and then one morning after not sleeping all night he spat in the sink and it was green. Just a chest cold.

He recovered enough by Valentine's Day to take Sheilah to the Cocoanut Grove. It didn't matter that it rained. Inside, the palms swayed, the waterfall cascaded softly behind the orchestra. They danced every dance, and between sets, at the same table where they'd first flirted, he gave her a pair of earrings with her birthstone, sapphire, which made her cry. He didn't tell her that Zelda had sent him a card, or how strange he felt, spending the day with someone else.

By the end of the night he was tired, and though it was late and he had to go to work the next day, he knew she expected him to stay over. It had become a pattern with them, the long droughts and tender reconciliations, and as they climbed the hill to her place they were silent in anticipation. He walked her to the door, and she held it open for him.

He was grateful, after blundering once again, that she wanted him back, and did everything, short of promising the impossible, to be worthy of another chance. They talked best in bed, as if making love was just a preface. She compared her weakness for him to a sickness, or a sin. She didn't care. In some way she didn't understand, she needed him. When they were apart, she confessed, sprawled across him, she starved herself.

“Feel my ribs. Here.”

He didn't know whether to be frightened or flattered. He was sorry for her, and resolved to do better. He'd had a talent for happiness once, though he was young then, and lucky. But wasn't he lucky now, again? When he was with her like this, he could forget the past. No one else had that power, and yet in the end he feared he would disappoint her.

They were making love a second time, well after midnight, meeting each other sweetly, when, at the edge of release, straining to his limit, he felt dizzy. He was on his knees behind her, arching, his whole body clenched, and the room, dark save moonlight, dimmed briefly as if the power had flickered. A curtain of purple spangles swam before his eyes like the afterimage of a flashbulb. An exalted, floating sensation buoyed him, as if he were drifting up out of himself. He thought he might faint. To keep from toppling off the bed, he held on to her waist.

“Don't stop,” she said.

He kept going. The feeling was momentary, as in boxing, shaking off the shock of being hit in the face. He was back inside his skin again. As he breathed, the world returned in all its fullness, warm and soft and dark, and he gave himself to it without regret.

“Are you all right?” she asked, lying beside him afterwards, because he was still panting.

“You're going to wear me out.”

In the morning, pondering that rapture as he stood at his window, watching the door of the drugstore, he supposed it was a kind of ecstasy, an overload of the nervous system. Part of it was working too hard, and a lack of sleep. He couldn't help but think of Zelda. They'd been dedicated to pleasure, yet even at their wildest, raging on Pernod and cocaine, reproducing the
Kama Sutra
page by page, he'd never been transported like that.

He waited for it to happen again, those nights he stayed over, waking her for athletic seconds, trying to recreate the same conditions until she protested. Did he know what time it was?

Fidelity
eluded him as well. He wasn't going to make eight weeks. Easter was coming, and he feared that Stromberg, like Mank, would assign it to someone else while he was gone. He had no choice. He'd promised Scottie.

His solution, as always, was to put in longer hours. He came home from the studio, started a pot of coffee and kept going.

“You'd think you owned stock in it,” Bogie said, dropping off some of Mayo's chicken soup. He knew not to linger, just set the bowl in the fridge and tiptoed away again.

It was easier late at night, with the Garden asleep, but then, stuck on a line of dialogue, he looked up and the clock on the stove said it was a quarter to three. He'd wasted too much time on the beginning. Now all he could do was block out the remaining scenes and fill them in after he got back.

In the midst of this, as anyone could have predicted, Hitler invaded Austria, making
Fidelity
not merely tiresome but pointless as well. Dottie, in solidarity, quit work on her picture and dedicated herself to fundraising for the displaced. Scott envied her the luxury. Like Oppy, he wasn't allowed to stop.

Two weeks before Easter, he finished a big scene and stood up from the table, dazed and achy. He wasn't done, but he needed a break, and he was running low on cigarettes. The clock said he could make it to Schwab's before midnight, so he grabbed his keys and jacket and set off down the steps and across the patio. A wet mist hung in the air, the lamps along the walkway haloed. Though it was too cold to swim, the pool was lit, and the ringed trunks of the palms, their fronds rattling in the breeze. On the top floor of the main house, like a beacon through the murk, a single window glowed yellow. In it, featureless, centered as in a formal portrait, stood the silhouette of a figure.

He stopped, the only sound a fountain splashing.

The figure didn't move. He thought it might be a joke—a clothestree or dressmaker's dummy placed there by Benchley to scare him.

Why should he be frightened? He wasn't a child. He had his own ghosts, one he would never outrun, no matter how far he fled.

If it was Alla, though. He waited to see if, as before, she might give him a sign.

The figure looked down at him—in judgment or with mutual curiosity, he couldn't say.

He waved in acknowledgment, then felt silly. He checked his watch: five minutes.

When he looked again, the window—the whole house—was dark.

“Okay,” he said, “you got me,” and walked on, frowning and peering up as if, from the dark, the figure were still watching him. It was no specter, probably just an overnight guest staying at the main house, tired like him but unable to sleep.