Evening in Byzantium (19 page)

Now Klein was standing in the marble front hallway of the mansion talking to some other people who had just arrived. He was dressed in a black velvet jacket, a ruffled shirt, and a bright red bow tie. Beside him was an anxious-looking woman who ran public relations for his firm. It was she who had sent out the invitations for the evening, and she looked pained when she saw Craig standing there in slacks and a blue blazer. Most, but not all, of the other guests were in evening clothes, and Craig could tell by the look on the woman’s face that she sensed a small betrayal in his choice of clothing.

Klein shook his hand warmly, smiling. “Ah,” he said, “the great man. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.” He didn’t explain why he was afraid Craig would not come but introduced him to the people whom he had been talking to. “You know Tonio Corelli, of course, Jess,” he said.

“By sight.” Corelli was the beautiful young Italian actor from the Hotel du Cap swimming pool, now resplendent in a jet black, Roman-tailored dinner jacket. They shook hands.

“And if you will introduce the ladies,
carino
,” Klein said. “I didn’t quite catch your names, dears,” he added apologetically.

“This is Nicole,” Corelli said, “and this is Irene.”

Nicole and Irene smiled dutifully. They were as pretty and tan and well-shaped as the girls who had been with Corelli at the pool, but they were not the same girls.

He goes in for matched pairs, Craig thought, he must run them in and out on a schedule. Craig recognized envy as easily in himself as in the next man.

“Honey,” Klein said to the public relations woman, “take them in and get them a drink. If you want to dance,” he said to the girls, “be careful you don’t catch pneumonia. The band’s outside. I couldn’t make a deal on the weather, and winter came up. The merry month of May.”

The trio, led by the public relations woman, drifted beautifully away.

“The only thing to be,” Klein said, “is Italian.”

“I know what you mean,” Craig said. “Though you don’t seem to be doing so badly.” He made a gesture to take in the luxury of his surroundings. He had heard that Klein was paying five thousand dollars for the month he had rented the house.

“I’m not complaining. I go with the flow,” Klein said, grinning. He took an honest pleasure in his wealth. “It’s not an uncomfortable little pad. Well, Jesse, it’s good seeing you again. How’re things going?”

“Fine,” Craig said. “Just fine.”

“I invited Murphy and his frau,” Klein said, “but they declined with thanks. They don’t mingle with the lower orders.”

“They’re here for a rest,” Craig said, lying for his friend. “They’re going to bed early this week, they told me.”

“He was a great man, Murphy,” Klein said. “In his day. You’re still with him, of course?”

“Of course.”

“As I once told you,” said Klein, “your loyalty does you credit. Is he working on something for you?” He threw away the line carelessly, turning his head as he spoke to survey his guests through the archway that gave into the great living room.

“Not that I know of,” Craig said.

“You have anything on the fire yourself?” Klein turned back toward him.

Craig hesitated. “Maybe,” he said. He had told no one but Constance and Murphy that he was considering doing a picture again. And Murphy had made his position clear. More than clear. Craig dropped his hint deliberately now. Of all the men gathered for the Festival, Klein, with his energy and his labyrinthine network of contacts, could be the most useful. “I’m playing with an idea.”

“That’s great news.” The enthusiasm in Klein’s voice was almost genuine. “You’ve been away too long, Jess. If you need any help, you know where to come, don’t you?” Klein put an affectionate hand on his sleeve. “Anything for a friend. We put combinations together these days that make even
my
mind whirl.”

“So I’ve been told. Maybe I’ll give you a call one of these days and we can talk some more.” Murphy would be hurt if he heard. He was a man proud of his acumen, and he took it ill if clients and friends didn’t follow his advice. Murphy was contemptuous of Klein. “That punk little hustler” was Murphy’s description of Klein. “In three years he won’t even be a memory.” But Murphy these days did not come up with combinations that made the mind whirl.

“There’s a swimming pool out in the garden,” Klein said. “Come any time you like. You don’t have to call in advance. This is one house in which you’re always welcome.” There was a last affectionate little pat on the arm, and Klein turned to meet a new group that was arriving as Craig went into the salon.

The room was crowded because it was too cold to go outside where the band was playing, and on his way to the bar Craig had to say, “Excuse me,” several times to get past guests clustered around easy chairs and small sofas. He asked for a glass of champagne. He had to drive back to Cannes, and if he drank whisky all night, the trip over the winding dark hillside roads would be a tricky one.

Corelli was at the bar with his two girls. “We should have gone to the French party,” one of the girls was saying. She had a British accent. “This one is for the dodoes. I bet the average age here is forty-five.”

Corelli smiled, offering the room the glory of his teeth.

Craig turned his back on the bar and looked at the room. Natalie Sorel was seated at a far corner, deep in conversation with a man who was lounging on the arm of her chair. Craig knew that she was so nearsighted that she could never recognize him at that distance. His own eyes were good enough to see that no matter what the English girl said, Natalie Sorel was no dodo.

“I used to hear about the parties in Cannes,” the English girl said. “Wild. Everybody smashing glasses and dancing naked on the tables and orgies in the swimming pools. The fall of the Roman Empire.”

“That was in the old days,
cara
,” Corelli said. He had a heavy accent. Craig had seen him in some English films, and now he realized that Corelli’s voice had been dubbed. Probably, Craig thought, his teeth aren’t his own, either. The thought comforted him.

“This is about as wild as tea at the vicarage,” the girl said. “Why don’t we just curtsy and say good night and leave?”

“It is not polite,
carissima
,” Corelli said. “And besides, it is full of important people here who are not to be offended by young actors.”

“You’re a drag, darling,” the girl said.

Craig surveyed the room looking for friends, enemies, and neutrals. Aside from Natalie there was a French actress by the name of Lucienne Dullin, seated, as though by some unfailing instinct, in the exact center of the room, attended by a shifting honor guard of young men. She was one of the most beautiful women Craig had ever seen, in a simple, bare-shouldered white dress, with her hair pulled back severely so that the feline bone structure of her face and the long elegance of her throat descending to the perfect shoulders could best be appreciated. She was not a bad actress, but if you looked like that, it was unfair if you weren’t Garbo. Craig had never met her, and he didn’t want to meet her, but looking at her gave him enormous pleasure.

There was a huge, fat Englishman, well under forty, accompanied, like Corelli, by two young women. They were laughing hysterically at some joke he had just made. He had been pointed out to Craig on the beach. He was a banker, and the anecdote about him was that the month before in the bank in the city of London over which he presided, he had personally handed over a check for three and a half million dollars to Walt Klein. Craig understood why the two girls flanked the banker and why they laughed at his jokes.

Near the fireplace Bruce Thomas was standing talking to a hulking bald man by the name of Hennessy whom Craig recognized as the director of a film that was to be shown at the Festival later in the week. Thomas had a picture that had already played six months in New York and was still running, and Hennessy’s picture, his first hit, was doing record-breaking business in an art house on Third Avenue. It was already being touted for a prize at the Festival.

Ian Wadleigh, not in Madrid, a glass in his hand, was standing talking to Eliot Steinhardt and a third man, portly in a dark suit, the face, bronzed by the sun, under a shock of iron-gray hair. The third man looked familiar to Craig, but he couldn’t exactly place him. Wadleigh bulged out of his dinner jacket, which had obviously been bought in better and thinner days. He was not yet drunk but was flushed and talking fast. Eliot Steinhardt listened amiably, a slight smile on his face. He was a small twinkly man of about sixty-five, his face sharp and foxlike and slyly malicious. He had made a score of the biggest hits in the business, going all the way back to the middle 1930s, and although the new critics now sneered at him as old-fashioned, he calmly continued to turn out one hit after another as though success had made him immune to defamation or mortality. Craig liked and admired him. If Wadleigh hadn’t been talking to him, he would have gone over to say hello. Later, when he’s alone, Craig thought.

Murray Sloan, the critic for one of the trade papers, whose tastes were surprisingly avant-garde and whose most intense emotions seemed to be experienced in darkened projection rooms, was seated on a big couch talking to a man Craig didn’t recognize. Sloan was a round, mahogany-tanned, smiling man whose devotion to his profession was so great that he had confided one evening to Craig that he had stopped sleeping with a girl he had picked up at the Venice Festival because she didn’t appreciate Buñuel sufficiently.

Well, Craig thought, looking over the room, whether Corelli’s English beauty is intelligent or not, she’s right in saying it certainly isn’t the fall of the Roman Empire. It was rich and decorous and pleasant, but whatever cross-currents were flowing through the room and whatever corruption lay beneath the fine clothes, it all was well hidden, the loved and the unloved, the moneyed and the moneyless observing an evening truce, ambition and desolation politely side by side.

It was very different from the old parties in Hollywood when people who made five thousand dollars a week would not invite people who made less to their homes. A new society, Craig thought, out of the ashes of the old. The movement of the proletariat toward Möet and Chan-don and the caviar pot.

He saw the man who was talking to Wadleigh and Eliot Steinhardt look in his direction, smile and wave, and start toward him. He smiled tentatively in return, knowing that he had seen the man somewhere and should remember his name.

“Hi, Jess,” the man said, putting out his hand.

“Hello, David,” Craig said, shaking hands. “Believe it or not, I didn’t recognize you.”

The man chuckled. “It’s the hair,” he said. “I get it all the time.”

“You can’t blame people,” Craig said. David Teichman was one of the first men he had met when he first went to Hollywood, and even then there hadn’t been a hair on his head.

“It’s a wig,” the man said, touching the top of his bush complacently. “It takes twenty years off my age. I’m even having a second run with the girls. That reminds me—I had dinner with your girl in Paris. She told me you were down here, and I told her I’d look you up. I just got down here this morning, and I’ve been playing gin all day. That’s some girl you got there. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Craig said. “Do you mind if people ask you why you suddenly blossomed out with a mane?”

“Not at all, not at all. I had a little operation on my dome, and the doc left a couple of foxholes in my skull to remember him by. Not a very happy cosmetic effect, you might say. No sense in an old man going around frightening small children and virgin daughters. The studio hairdressing department fixed me up with the best damn hairpiece in the business. It’s the only good thing that goddamn studio has turned out in five years.” Teichman’s false teeth clamped fiercely in his mouth as he spoke about the studio. He had been forced out of control more than a year ago, but he still spoke of it as though it were his personal domain. He had run it tyrannically for twenty-five years, and the habit of possession was hard to break. Bald, he had been a formidable-looking man, his head suggesting a siege weapon, his features fleshy and harsh, half-Roman emperor, half-merchant skipper, the skin deeply weathered all year round as though he had been in the field with his troops or on deck in storms with his crew. His voice had matched his appearance, brutal and commanding. In his palmy days many of the movies that had come out of his studio had been tender and wistfully comic, one more surprise in a surprising town. With the new wig he looked a different man, gentle and harmless, and his voice, too, as if to accommodate to the new arrangement, was soft and reflective.

Now he put his hand affectionately on Craig’s sleeve and said as he looked around him, “Oy, Jess, I am not happy in this room. A flock of vultures feeding off the bones of giants. That’s what the movie business has become, Jess. Great old bones with little patches of flesh still left on it that the birds of prey are tearing off bit by bit. And what are they turning out in their search for the Almighty Dollar? Peep shows. Pornography and bloodshed. Why don’t they all go to Denmark and be done with it? And the theatre’s no better. Carrion. What’s Broadway today? Pimps, whores, drug pushers, muggers. I don’t blame you for running away from it all.”

“You’re exaggerating as usual, David,” Craig said. He had worked at Teichman’s studio in the fifties and had caught on early that the old man was addicted to flights of rhetoric, usually to put over a shrewd and well-taken point. “There’re some damn good pictures being made today, and there’s a whole rash of young playwrights on and off Broadway.”

“Name them,” Teichman said. “Name one. One good picture.”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll name two. Three,” Craig said, enjoying the debate. “And made by men right in this room tonight. Steinhardt’s last picture and Thomas’s and that new fellow talking to Thomas over there, Hennessy.”

“Steinhardt doesn’t count,” Teichman said. “He’s a leftover from the old days. A rock that was left standing when the glacier receded. The other two guys—” Teichman made a contemptuous sound. “Flashes in the pan. One-shot geniuses. Sure, every once in a while somebody shows up with a winner. Accidents still happen. They don’t know what they’re doing, they just wake up and find out they’ve fallen into a pot of gold. I’m talking about careers, boy, careers. No accidents. Chaplin, Ford, Stevens, Wyler, Capra, Hawkes, Wilder, yourself, if you want to include yourself. Although you were a little too special, maybe, and all over the place, if you don’t mind my saying so.”