Max (37 page)

‘You know, I feel sorry for the dumb bastard.'

‘You're crazy,' Snyder told him.

‘Yeah, maybe.'

And then Dan Silverman, the largest film producer and theatre owner in Boston, telephoned Max the following day.

‘What can I do for you?' Max asked him.

‘Max, I got brave. I told the trust to fuck off and pulled my films. But now I'm out on a limb. I need moving pictures. I got thirty-two houses with appetites for movies like a horse for oats.'

‘Are you offering me an exchange?'

‘You got to let me in. I'm out on a limb.'

‘I'll have Freddy draw up the papers. Meanwhile, I got twenty-four features in my library since you walked out on me for the trust. How many do you want?'

‘All of them. Every moving picture you got that we didn't show.'

Roosevelt came to New York to make a speech in Cooper Union. He asked to have Max Britsky on the dais with him, and he embraced Max in front of a packed hall of cheering Bull Moose supporters. The following day, Abe Cohen in St Louis and Frank Immelman in Chicago broke with the trust and joined Max's film exchange. Feldman was walking on air. Max invited Feldman and his wife, Leah, a shy little woman, to dinner at his Sixty-sixth Street house. All through the evening, she never spoke except to say ‘Please' or ‘Thank you' or ‘Excuse me.' Sam Snyder and his wife, Alice, were also at the table, since the dinner was in the way of a victory celebration, but Alice was quiet and uneasy. She could live with Max's inclusion of Della O'Donnell at the Snyder dinner table, but two women in relation to Max were more than she could handle. Nor was she fond of Sally, who was very formal and very reserved.

Feldman was not a good drinker. He had too much wine, and he proposed a garbled toast to the ‘two great men of our time, Teddy and Max!'

‘Oh, I wouldn't compare Teddy to Max,' Sally said.

Snyder sensed the sarcasm and hostility, but Max, who also had too much to drink, spread his arms and said, ‘There's a lady respects her husband. But you got to give Teddy credit where credit's due.'

When Max handed Snyder a long Cuban cigar and started to light one himself, Sally said sharply, ‘I think you might wait until the women are out of the room.'

When Frank Stanford telephoned Bert Bellamy and asked Bellamy to join him for lunch, Bellamy agreed: not out of any sense of disloyalty to Max, but because Bellamy was a man who felt that the world changes. He was less aware of how much he himself had changed, for he still preserved somewhere in his mind a shadow of the relationship that had once existed between himself and Max. But it was very much of a shadow. In the old days, he had accepted the fact that Max was shrewd and very often damn clever. He could afford this generosity: he was taller than Max, better looking than Max, and just as wealthy as Max. Now Max was a millionaire and he, Bert Bellamy, was Max's employee. It made a difference, and there was no question but that those around the industry were aware of the fact that it made a difference. Sally was aware of it. Fred Feldman was aware of it, and so was Frank Stanford – which was why he came to Bert.

Like Max, Stanford had spent most of his adult years in the moving picture business, and he knew the burgeoning industry from top to bottom. Stanford was a tall, good-looking man, well over six feet, with graying hair and pale blue eyes. He said to Bellamy, ‘You and I can talk to each other and understand each other, Bert, a lot better than I can do talking to Max. Maybe you think I'm anti-Semitic. That's a lot of horseshit. If I lose my temper and call someone a Jew, well, it's just calling a spade a spade, and I just can't remember how damn sensitive those people are.'

‘They're sensitive, all right,' Bert agreed.

‘Now that statement Max picked up and made such a big thing with – Hell, you get excited and you talk. I had no idea what I said was being taken down.'

Bert nodded and waited.

‘It looks like hell in print.'

‘It does.'

‘I can understand why I became the whipping boy for the trust. They had to have someone to lay it on, but I've been out of work for three months now, and I got this Jew-baiting thing hung around my neck like a goddamn sack of cement. You know me long enough. I may be a son of a bitch, but I'm no Jew-baiter. I been working with Jews for years, and if Max thinks there are no Jews in the trust, he's wrong.'

Bert nodded. He anticipated what was coming and wondered how Stanford would put it.

‘I need a job. Desperately. I want you to ask Max to give me a break. I hear his exchange is growing every day, and I'm a damn good film salesman. He knows that.'

‘What makes you think that Max, of all people, would give you a job?'

‘You get that feeling about Max. He'd kill you at the drop of a hat, but he doesn't hold grudges. All I want you to do is to put a word in and get Max to talk to me. Do it, and I'll remember it, Bert.'

Bert shrugged. ‘I don't know, Frank. Max is a funny guy, and there's no telling what he'll do. But I'll give it a try.'

A week later, Della came into Max's office and said, ‘You will never believe who is outside and says he has an appointment with you.'

‘Frank Stanford.'

‘Himself.'

‘Send him in,' Max said. When Stanford had entered the room, Max walked around, closed the door behind him, and told him to sit down. ‘Don't cry about it,' Max said. ‘I hate to see anyone ass-licking, so don't tell me you're sorry. Those shitheads at the trust dumped on you because someone has to take the fall, and now no one will hire you. Bert laid that out for me. Can you think of one reason why I should give you a job?'

‘I can think of one,' Stanford said. ‘It was my stupidity that gave you your opening to go in after National, and now they're falling to pieces, even without your lawsuit.'

‘That's a good reason. But who hires someone for stupid?'

‘I'm not stupid, Max. You know that. I was running errands.'

‘Yeah. All right. See Bert. He runs the theatre section.'

‘Just like that?'

‘Yeah, just like that.'

‘I don't know how to thank you –'

‘Forget it, forget it.'

Afterward, Della asked him why, and Max told her, ‘I don't know, kid. It's a lousy world, and when you start sliding down – Ah, hell, Frank's no worse than any of us. He was just on the other side. He was their son of a bitch. Now he's our son of a bitch. We can use him.'

It had to happen sooner or later. People get careless. They were shooting four pictures at a time, two in the ice house and two in the big studio in Harlem. Sally and Freedman often worked until midnight, and Max spent more and more evenings at Della's tiny flat on East Twenty-third Street. It reminded him of the room Sally had had on Tenth Street. How strange it was that the time of his meeting and falling in love with Sally had become so distant as to belong to another life. He wasn't in love with Della. He never thought of Della in terms of being in love, nor had it occurred to him that since he had first gone to bed with Della, he had gone to bed with no one else – not his wife, not any of the pretty little kids who were always hanging around the entrance to both studios, pleading to work in movies for two dollars a day and ready to crawl into bed with anyone who gave them the opportunity. Max wasn't introspective; he did what he felt the need to do without any great self-examination; and it was enough that with Della he felt comfortable. For one thing, Della was an inch shorter than Max, Sally in heels was an inch taller; it made a difference. For another, Della cherished him and mothered him and never corrected his speech.

Thus with both of them falling into two separate existences and becoming increasingly casual about it, it had to happen that Max would walk into his house unexpectedly and find Sally in Freedman's arms, the two of them engaging in a deep and passionate kiss. It was before the era of Sigmund Freud's pervasiveness, and if anyone had told Max that they were caught in that posture because they wanted to be caught, he would have said that the whole notion was insane. For Max, it was purely an accident.

Sally and Freedman, aware of Max's presence, pulled back from each other; and then the three of them stood in a tableau for a few seconds. No one said a word. Sally and Freedman stared at Max. Max looked through them. Then Max walked between them and they stepped back to let him pass. The incident had taken place in the vestibule of the brownstone. Max went past them into the living room, where he remained standing and heard the outside door close. He stood with his hands in his pockets, facing the wall. Sally entered the room.

‘I'm sorry it had to happen like this,' Sally said.

‘Yeah.' A long moment of silence.

‘For God's sake, aren't you going to say anything?'

‘What's to say? I could tell you not to shit on your own doorstep, but that's done. What do you want to do? You want to marry that pisspot?'

‘No!'

‘Then go to bed!'

From that point on, Sally and Max had separate rooms. Max never mentioned the incident again, nor did he have any real sense of what he himself felt. He had not had intercourse with Sally for a number of years, and while he had never suspected her of having strong and unsatisfied appetites, he could hardly blame her. But no concept of equal rights had ever entered his head, and if he did not feel any sense of a betrayal on the part of Sally, he did feel an invasion of property rights on the part of Freedman. He was also disappointed in himself. He should have been enraged. He should have, as he thought of it, kicked the shit out of Freedman, whom he had always held in a certain degree of contempt. But he wasn't enraged, and he had no desire to beat up Freedman. In fact, he was relieved, and the fact that he was relieved provoked him. As for Freedman, Max couldn't even fire him, since the four films in production were all more or less under Freedman's control if not his direction.

What irritated Max more than anything else was the fact that Freedman never came around to apologise or explain – if such things can be explained – but instead acted as if nothing of consequence had taken place. Freedman had changed, but the change in him over the years had been so gradual that Max had never become specifically aware of it. Freedman was developing a national and, to some degree, international reputation. When he directed
The Raiders
, a Civil War film shot almost entirely out of doors on Long Island, critical articles were written about him as well as about the film. In interviews Freedman made no mention of Sam Snyder and his innovations in terms of laying tracks for a moving camera and his use of new lenses for close-ups, nor of the photographers, nor of a brilliant young writer, Jo Stefenson by name, who had written the scenario and who had offered a way to substitute action for most of the dialogue cards. The picture was embraced by Freedman as his own work, his total creation. He was no longer uncertain of himself. For the Long Island work, he had donned riding breeches and leather puttees, and though he never mounted a horse, he liked the gesture of emphasising his orders with a quirt, which he slapped against his open palm. He also had a young man who kept pace with him, carrying a megaphone and a jug of hot coffee. He was by no means unconscious of his role-acting. When he had started as a film director, there had been no such creature. He felt it incumbent upon him to define the animal, and this he did.

So he's screwing my wife, Max said to himself. I ought to break the bastard's ass or fire him or both.

But he did neither. He just didn't care. There were three new young directors working for him under Freedman's guidance, and four months later, feeling that these new men could carry on perfectly well, Max called Freedman into his office and said, ‘I think you're an overpriced shithead, Gerry, and a second-rate son of a bitch.'

‘Why don't you just fire me, Max, and not indulge your gutter beginnings?'

‘I've outgrown them, Gerry. Otherwise, I'd kick the shit out of you. Sure, you're fired.'

A week later, Freedman went to work for Sunshine Productions in New Jersey, and about six weeks after that, Max read that Gerald Freedman and Sunrise's bright new star, Monica Legrange, were to be married. He felt sorry for Sally. She was suddenly older and very tired-looking. For weeks, she had been working on a scenario based on
David Copperfield
. It was the first scenario she had undertaken entirely by herself, and Max promised her that it would be the most important production they had ever mounted. Any anger he might have felt toward Sally had turned into enormous guilt, and he bought her a magnificent ermine wrap.

She thanked him lackadaisically.

‘You shouldn't have told Mama we were sleeping in separate rooms.'

‘She asked me. She keeps coming in here when we're away.'

‘She likes to see the kids.'

‘It's still my house. She comes in and prowls through it. She talks to the servants.'

‘She's so upset about the separate rooms,' Max explained.

Sally snorted. ‘That one!' She flung the fur wrap across the room. ‘I'm upset too. Tell her that!'

‘You have no reason to feel guilty,' Della said to him. ‘She did the same thing.'

Max stopped pacing in Della's living room to turn and stare at her. Della was sitting in a Morris chair, knitting calmly. Della's apartment lacked the color and charm Sally had given to her place; it was solidly comfortable, with comfortable, unimaginative furniture, with a picture of the Virgin with the Child on one wall and, facing it, a crocheted sampler that asked the viewer to speak a small prayer and bless our happy home. The windows had lace curtains, and in the bedroom, over Della's bed, there was a crucifix and the figure of Christ. All of this made Max somewhat uneasy, especially the act of sexual intercourse under the crucifix. To Max, Della's Catholicism was totally confusing. She was delighted to have him for a lover, and without question, she loved him; but she made it plain that if he divorced Sally, she could never marry him, nor was she certain that she could carry on the affair with a divorced man.