Max (47 page)

‘How could they do that?' Gertrude asked.

‘Learn, kid, learn. You want to join the tribe in the jungle, so learn.'

Another uniformed footman wiped the grape juice from the count's clothes. He sat down, smiling foolishly. There was no interpreter, no one who spoke French. No one explained how he had gotten there. The meal went on under an unwavering din of talk. ‘Most of them,' Max explained to Gertrude, ‘get tanked up before they come to a dinner at Pickfair. They come here drunk and they keep reserves out in their cars. It's a kind of an idiot game.'

She couldn't forget the dribble glass. ‘Is that poor man a real count?'

‘I guess so. You'd be amazed how many of these schmucks with titles come here, and it's their big moment to get invited to Pickfair. Now take it easy. You're going to get your ankle bitten.'

‘What?'

Max nodded at the head of the table. Douglas Fairbanks had disappeared, and the inner circle of Pickfairians, up and down the table, paused in their consumption of mounds of strawberry ice cream topped with Alpine slopes of whipped cream laced with heavy syrup and maraschino cherries to await the heady result of Fairbanks's humor.

‘He's under the table,' Max whispered into Gertrude's ear.

She screamed, and the inner circle burst into convulsive laughter.

Later, in Max's car, Gertrude Meyerson was weeping and she wanted to know where Max was taking her.

‘I would take you home, but you tell me you got no home, so I'll give you a place to sleep tonight. Why are you crying? Does it hurt where he bit you?'

‘No. It didn't even break the skin.'

‘So what's the tears? It ain't every kid from Milwaukee gets bitten by a great movie star.'

‘I don't know.'

‘What don't you know?'

‘I don't know why I'm crying, except that I feel crazy and I got no home and no money and I don't want to think how terrible those people are, because maybe that's the right way.'

‘What right way?'

‘I don't even know what I mean. I don't even know why I'm frightened, because I don't think I'm frightened of you. I don't know why I'm crying.'

‘Don't you feel lucky?' Max asked her. ‘After two years of breaking your heart, you got a chance to be in the movies.'

‘Have I? Really?'

‘I told you.'

‘I'll try to stop crying.'

Then she sat quietly while he guided the car over the pass and down into the San Fernando Valley and along the palm-lined dirt road that led to the studio. He had planted the palms himself along this approach road, four hundred of them, lining what would one day be a broad avenue. Palm trees fascinated him. Max was not a reader. In all his life he had never read a real novel, and the readers used as textbooks during his first years of schooling were only a dim memory. He had read many scenarios, but this was an act of discipline, performed without pleasure. Without any background of reading and with his religious education truncated at a very early age, Max had only the vaguest notions of a place where Jews had once originated. Yet he connected it with palms and the dry dust of desertland. He loved palms and century plants and Morocco ivy and the marvelous variety of cactus plants obtainable in Southern California, while Southern California itself became astrange love-hate place. During the nine years he had been here in Southern California, Los Angeles had changed from a sleepy backwash of a village into a place that urbanised itself overnight, growing with explosive force. After his purchase of three hundred acres in the valley, studio after studio appeared, each producer purchasing a large tract of land – in Culver City, in West Los Angeles and Hollywood, and in the San Fernando Valley – and with the studios came surfaced roads and houses and thousands of people to operate the studios, and more thousands of working people and merchants to build the houses and sell the goods that the people in the studios required, and the raw, dry tracts that Harry Culver and Burt Green had cornered and euphemistically titled Culver City and Beverly Hills had each in turn, in the space of a few years, become an actual city, Culver City a sprawling mélange around three film studios, and Beverly Hills, the residential paradise of the new industry that threw up stars and directors and producers with the speed of mushrooms after a rain, most of them paid more than most tycoons of American industry had ever dreamed of earning.

And when Gertrude Meyerson, staring ahead of her down at the stygian darkness of the San Fernando Valley, had asked Max where they were going, he told her, ‘To my studio.'

‘The Max Britsky Studio?'

‘So they tell me.'

‘And you live there, Mr Britsky?'

‘Sometimes. I'll have a place for you to sleep, so tomorrow you won't need a pass after all. You'll be inside, and I'll call Melvin Dubberman, who's our casting director, and lo and behold, you're in movies. Meanwhile, I'm glad you stopped crying.'

At the studio gates, an armed, uniformed guard flashed his light into the car, recognised Max, nodded, and then opened the gates. Vaguely, in the headlights, Gertrude could make out the studio street, the towering stages and the bulk of other buildings, and then, a bit farther on, a sleepy village street, and then a white cottage, where Max parked his car. A switch on the porch flicked on the lights, and then Max led the way into his reception room.

‘In there,' he told her, ‘is my private office. You become a big star, I'll see you in my private office. Meanwhile, we go upstairs.' He led the way up a staircase at one side of the entry, past the eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial furniture, past a needlepoint rug on the floor and a subdued striped wallpaper that followed the staircase to the second floor. There were two bedrooms on the second floor, each opening off the small landing, each with its own bath. Max's bedroom had a hooked rug with a large turkey design on the tile floor, a toile wallpaper, a rather heavy post and ball bed, and two early eighteen-hundreds chests of drawers. The other room was furnished more lightly, a delicate fourposter with a canopy, another needlepoint rug, and a wallpaper of pastel pink and yellow stripes. Max watched Gertrude's face as he turned on a lamp in this room. The tears and depression had given way to delight.

‘It's so pretty,' she said.

‘Yeah, so they tell me.'

‘And you live here, Mr Britsky, all alone out here?'

‘Actually, I live in Beverly Hills, my mother's house. The way it works out, I mostly live here. It's convenient. I don't have to drive to work. I'll find you a pair of my pajamas, and in the bathroom there's toothbrush, cream – whatever you need.' She was still standing where he had left her when he returned with a pair of pajamas. Then he left, closing her door behind him. He closed the door to his own bedroom and opened the window, letting in the cool night air. He loved the smell of night-blooming jasmine and had ordered a large stand of it to be planted outside his cottage. Then he undressed, brushed his teeth, put on his own pajamas, and got into bed. He selected a Cuban cigar, clipped the end, lit it, and lay back on two pillows, drawing the rich smoke softly and lovingly. He was amused by his experience with Gertrude Meyerson. His studio had just finished a very expensive film titled
The Caliph
. It was the story of a Middle Eastern potentate, a caliph of the Middle Ages, who donned the garb of a simple peasant and went among his people, having all sorts of violent and acrobatic adventures along the way. Like so many people with no training in or real knowledge of history, Max believed in the validity of his studio's childish recreations, and to some extent he saw himself as the caliph. On the other hand, he had had no intention whatsoever of attending the dinner party at Pickfair. He possessed an intuitive sense of what was gross, tasteless, stupidly vulgar, and while he tended not to be judgmental of the stars and directors who had finally emerged from his nickelodeons to become the culture heroes and the popular kings and queens of the twentieth century, he avoided when possible their celebratory rites. He was not too given to the curse of loneliness, and he still dined at least twice a week at the dinner table of Sam Snyder, filling his stomach with heavy German food and sweet, dark beer. The few evenings he spent alone in his cottage, which was actually a part of the standing sets at the Britsky lot, he enjoyed. Sally had never permitted him to smoke in bed, and when he smoked in the Beverly Hills house, Sarah denounced his action with her customary fury, none of it tempered by age. This tiny cottage was actually his first home, the first home that was wholly his and in which his word was absolute law. Now and then he had been tempted to build or buy a home of his own in Beverly Hills, but with second thoughts, he discarded the notion. He had not married again, and he saw no need for a great empty house. Through the years, he told himself that someday he would find another woman who was at least a good deal like Della O'Donnell, but as the years passed, Della became increasingly wonderful in his memory and her replacement increasingly unlikely.

But perhaps it was the aphrodisiac of power that prevented him from ever again finding a Della O'Donnell, particularly that aphrodisiac that surrounds a moving picture tycoon. The dry fields of West Los Angeles, spotted with hundreds of oil derricks, had given way to a city that became a magnet for beautiful young women from all over America and indeed, the world. They poured into Los Angeles with the dream of becoming stars in this incredible new phenomenon called moving pictures, and such was their hunger and their frustration that they would have sold their souls to the devil if success came with the contract. In the center of this, as the reigning lord of the Max Britsky Studio and the thousand or so theatres that it serviced, Max had at the flick of his finger the sexual services of any one of a thousand beautiful women. In all truth, he went to bed with very few. His fellow tycoons outdid him, but whatever happened in this strange new world of Hollywood took on legendary proportions, and since Max was always at the center of the legend, the truth was submerged in the myth.

Gertrude Meyerson believed the myth and pursued it, and knocked timidly at the door to Max's room.

‘Come in.'

Max was a small man, but she was smaller in his pajamas. The sleeves covered her hands; the trousers were rolled up. She walked in barefoot. She stood by Max's bed, staring at him.

‘Smoke bother you?'

‘No. My father smoked cigars.'

‘He's dead?'

She nodded.

‘Sit down.'

She sat on the edge of the bed and asked timidly, ‘Why don't you think I'm attractive?' She had washed the cheap, badly done makeup from her face. It was a broad, open face, pale and sad, the blue eyes widely set, the mouth full and well shaped.

‘You're a nice-looking girl. You came from a farm, didn't you?'

‘It's near Milwaukee.'

‘You never studied acting.'

‘No.'

‘Just come here and do it.'

‘Because I can,' she cried. ‘I know I can.'

‘Sure.'

‘Let me come to bed with you,' she said flatly. She had no artfulness, no tricks, not even an intuitive sense of feminine enticement.

‘You know, kid,' Max said to her, ‘my own daughter, Marion, she's just about your age. Some men like that. It makes them feel young. I look at you and think about how I don't see my own kid since maybe eight years ago. That stinks like hell, don't it? So I screw a little farmgirl who don't know which side is up, and that makes me feel better? I got to have shit in my blood to think like that.'

Tears welled into her pale blue eyes.

‘That kind of language you're not used to,' Max said. ‘My mother used to say my mouth should be washed out with soap. Brown horse soap. Listen, kid, you're not an actress. That's something I know. You're sweet-looking, but you don't look the way they want girls to look right now.'

She began to cry.

‘Don't do that, please. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Tomorrow, I'll find you a job. Can you type?'

She shook her head.

‘What can you do? Can you sew?'

She nodded.

‘All right. I'll put you in the wardrobe department. We'll start you at thirty-five dollars a week, which is very good money, believe me. We got half a dozen rooming houses over here on Ventura Boulevard, and I'll find you a room in one of them, clean and decent, and you get breakfast and supper for fifteen dollars a week. Then we got a coach on the lot here, he has a class in the afternoon three times a week. You go to his class, and maybe you learn something, because even if most actors are brainless schmucks, still, it's not something you get born with. You got to learn.'

The tears were pouring down her cheeks now.

‘Please, stop crying.'

‘Why are you being so nice to me?' she managed through her sobs.

‘Because I'm a schmuck. Now stop the goddamn crying and get out of here.'

‘And you don't want me?'

‘Jesus, Gertrude,' he snapped, ‘tonight I don't want to get laid – not by you, not by the queen of Sheba. Now get the hell out of here and go to sleep.'

It was remarkable how lighthearted he felt after she had left the room. He got out of bed, found a bottle of imported sherry in a commode, poured a small glass, and then went back to bed, lying propped up on his pillows, smoking his cigar, and sipping the sherry. There was no sharing a cigar; it was a foul, filthy thing to everyone except the man who happened to be smoking it; and the brief presence in the room of the wide-eyed girl from the beach served to underline the fact. Max felt better than he had felt in a long time. The sherry was sweet and pleasant. He had a serious and reliable bootlegger who did business only on the Britsky lot, and in return for the concession he brought in the very best. There were two scenarios on his night table that were waiting to be read, but Max was in no mood for reading tonight. He was full of a poignant sadness, content and discontent at once, thinking of the little blond farmgirl asleep in the next room, half regretful that he had not taken her to bed, but at the same time placing Sally in bed with him in his fantasy, the Sally of long, long ago.