Some Faces in the Crowd (11 page)

The tangled lines went slack as Brad’s sailfish threw the hook. “He’s gone,” Brad said tragically. “Would’ve hit fifty, maybe sixty pounds …” And his words were a jumble of profanity again.

Because our lines were crossed, I ruined his day, Martha thought. Both lines were in the boat now, and the hunchback was working deliberately to loosen the knotted loops.

It was almost half an hour before they could fish again. The sun was directly overhead, beating down oppressively. A dozen gulls were following them now.

“Gaviota,”
the hunchback said. “Damn
gaviota.”

Just then several dived for Brad’s line and his pole dipped sharply. “Sonofabitch. Now
I’ve
hooked one.” He was so exasperated that he couldn’t even reel in. “Here,
muchacha,
you handle it.” In his defeat, he turned on Martha again. “God damn it, next time I hook into something big, reel in, reel in like I told you.”

The gull that had been hooked left the water and flew up over the boat with the line trailing from its beak. Martha could see it flapping directly overhead, pulling against the hook and crying as the metal point ripped the lining of its throat. As the hunchback reeled it in, it flew around wildly over their heads. Martha screamed, and the gull screamed with her. What a horrible female chorus, she thought.

With a neat gesture, the hunchback reached up and snatched the bird.

“Don’t,” Martha said. “Please don’t.”

“Wait a minute,” Brad said. “Let me have it.”

Thank you, Brad, Martha thought, thank you, thank you. Do it quickly.

Brad took the bird, exactly as he had seen the hunchback do it, snapped its wings in his big hands and tossed it back into the sea.

“That the way you do it,
muchacha?”
he said, laughing.

She watched Brad’s gull flounder and then rise in a series of desperate convulsions. He had not even done this as the hunchback had, through hatred of everything more perfect than himself. It was merely something he had never done before.

She put her fingers to her throat to feel the throbbing. She shut her eyes against the glare on the water. Oh God, she thought, seeing in her mind the image of her dead father, the time has come at last, has come. Dear Father, give me strength …

W
HEN I FIRST MET
Doc he was working in the drug store on the corner, just outside the studio. That is, he was employed there, for he never seemed to be working. Doc treated the place as a sort of salon. He always managed to look more like a man of the world than a hired clerk. He had the dapper, creased appearance of a carbon-copy Man of Distinction. His face was florid and had begun to bulge over his high stiff collar. His eyes were always laughing at everything.

I was sent to the drug store on one of those annoying errands to get a physic for our associate producer, Harry Small.

Doc came forward in a flashy double-breasted suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole.

“I would like some kind of physic,” I whispered.

There are usually two ways to discuss a physic. Either you speak of it in hushed tones, or you stand your ground and blurt it out. But Doc was the kind of man who could lend as much dignity to the peddling of a physic as to the selling of rare manuscripts.

“And may I ask for whom it is for?” he said.

“You just did—it’s for Mr. Small.”

“Oh,” said Doc. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“What’s the diff?” I asked. “Producers need the same physics as the rest of us. Even supermen like Harry Small. Give.”

“Why does he need it?” Doc persisted.

“Listen,” I said, “he’s in the projection room now cutting his new picture. Why don’t you break in and ask him?”

Doc scolded me with a glance. “A physic is no laughing matter, young man,” he said.

“Who’s laughing?” I said. “Maybe he needs it because he got married last night and threw a big party for both his friends and all his enemies.”

“In that case,” said Doc solemnly, “I would suggest castor oil.”

Doc’s eyes pled sincerity, but as I looked at him I got the feeling that he wasn’t as dumb as he looked, that all this pomp and circumstance were just a joke, a very funny joke Doc was playing on the world. He was actually humoring you into thinking you were important, and what you were doing was important. All he seemed to want out of life was to make you feel that every second was a crisis in the world.

As Doc wrapped up the castor oil he inquired about Harry Small’s wife as if he were about to say, “Next time you see her, give her my very best.” Doc made you believe that being a drug-store salesman was just a hobby. I am sure that if President Eisenhower had ever ordered a toothbrush from him, he would have delivered it to the White House himself, saying, “I just dropped in a moment to be sure Mamie is taking care of her teeth—and what’s new with the wages and hours bill?”

“What sort of lady is Mrs. Small?” he asked.

“I can’t answer that,” I said, “because I never heard her called that before.”

“I hear she’s stacked,” Doc said.

Like all the great actors in the world, most of them never appearing on stage or screen, Doc could shift his moods like gears. His dignity was just so much grease paint that melted off in the heat of conversation, especially conversation about women. There was a touch of Casanova and plenty of traveling salesman in him.

“Give me that castor oil,” I said. “Mr. Small may need it when he gets through running his new picture.”

“I’ve been thinking about that marriage,” said Doc propping his chin up on the castor-oil box.

“Don’t worry about Harry,” I said. “The only man in Hollywood who ever stood in his way was a traffic cop—and Harry ran him down. … Now give me my change. If I know my Harry, I’ll be among the unemployed if I don’t get back in two minutes flat.”

I finally got my package and started off as if there were a pack of mad supervisors at my heels.

“Let me know how he makes out with it,” Doc called. “You might ring me up at home. I’ll be worried.”

“Listen,” I yelled back, “the way you carry on, you oughta join the Screen Actors Guild.”

“I am a member,” he answered. “I picked up a day at Metro last week, working with Greer.”

That’s how Doc got his big chance in the studio, acting, but not in a picture. Instead, he starred himself in a little life drama called
Feeling Sorry for Harry.
It so happened that Harry was reaching that stage where the sobs of his commiserators was his favorite sound track. He was beginning to believe the things they wrote about him in the local trade papers, about his being A Martyr to Our Business.

One morning a tragic editorial sobbed its way through a column and a half of the
Hollywood Recorder.
It was full of genuine concern for the men who almost sacrifice their lives to become heads of great studios. In its unique prose style, it began:

Go into the executive chambers and you will see producers all fagged out, tired almost to complete exhaustion, physically and mentally out, yes, even sick.

Naturally Doc read this, as he followed the trade papers faithfully in order to keep his finger on the pulse of the industry. Naturally, he took this message to heart. He ran straight to the phone and called Mr. Small.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry’s secretary sweetly but firmly, “Mr. Small is in a Board meeting. He can’t talk to anyone.”

“But this is a matter of life and death,” Doc begged, his voice breaking with emotion.

Small got on the phone. “Harry Small speaking,” he said aggressively. “Whose life and death are you talking about?”

“Yours,” said Doc emphatically. “I just read that warning about you, Mr. Small.”

“What warning?” asked Harry, ready to hang up.

“In the
Recorder,”
said Doc tearfully. “About producers working themselves to death. They meant you. It isn’t safe.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Harry. He was softening.

“We can’t afford to lose you,” said Doc. “If I were you I’d keep some adrenalin in your desk all the time, old man.”

“Thanks,” said Harry, “I’ll have my secretary get me some.”

“I’ll rush it right over myself,” Doc said.

Three minutes later he loped into the office like an Eskimo dog rushing serum to stricken Nome.

The next morning Doc was the new studio receptionist. He sat proudly behind the desk at the main door. I found him enthroned there when I was making my mail round.

He told me Mr. Small had given him the job because a good receptionist should anticipate people’s wishes, he should be able to size people up quickly enough to separate the wheat of desirable visitors from the usual sightseeing chaff, he should have tact, patience, insight, humor and intuition.

“I see,” I said. “A receptionist is something like God, only he’s on the payroll.”

“It’s the most fascinating job in the studio,” Doc confided. “It means you have to know something about every department—as the first contact outsiders meet, I am the Face of the Studio, as it were.”

From the moment Doc became the Face of the Studio, the reception room was charged with excitement, importance and intrigue. Every stranger who asked for an interview pass was treated as a potential spy determined to dynamite the sound stages. Any visitor of importance whom Doc recognized would be salaamed and announced like a nobleman entering a royal house. Job seekers no longer under his suspicion would receive lengthy, advice about their future in the studio, or Doc would inquire into their background, decide they were not yet ready and urge them to look for more experience elsewhere first.

One morning a delegation of high-school students from Atlanta, Georgia, bore down on the studio fifty strong.

“We cahm from G’ogia,” said the animated school-teacher who led them, “and we’d sho’ like to see one of these studios.”

Doc called Small’s office and the answer was, “Let them march through Georgia—not here.”

It was a tense moment.

“I’m sho’ sorry,” he said. “The studio is closed fo’ the day. But if you all’ll jes sit yo’self down, I’ll be mighty glahd to tell you all about it.”

I kept going through the reception room for an hour, and Doc never stopped talking. The schoolteacher was so glad to find somebody from Dixie that she hung on every magnolia-scented word.

Word of this triumph got back to Harry Small, and he puffed a thick smoke screen of pride around him with his Havana-Havana.

“That man has push,” he said. “He deserves something. Raise his salary to a hundred-and-seventy-five a month.”

But Harry Small could never understand people except in terms of himself. Doc didn’t have the push of a snail. He wasn’t playing to win. It was just good clean fun, and an irresistible urge to take care of it, to build it up, to treat little acorns as if they were great oaks.

As Doc grew more accustomed to his job, this urge began to get out of hand. Small’s secretary, Judy, noticed it first. Doc called her one day and told her to call a Mr. Carteret as soon as Mr. Small came in.

“But I know Mr. Small doesn’t want to talk to him,” Judy said.

“But you have to tell him,” Doc said, “for my sake.”

“What’s it got to do with you?” she asked.

“I gave Mr. Carteret my word of honor Mr. Small would call him,” Doc answered. “You wouldn’t let me down, would you?”

“Listen,” Judy said, “will you relax?”

I was just the office boy, so I could tell her, but she didn’t have Doc right, either. It was like asking the Statue of Liberty to relax. They both had their part to play, it was their place in the world.

Carteret was an old director, famous in silent days, who had suddenly appeared at the reception desk one day. He had one of those faces that say: I haven’t worked in years. His face was trellised with purple veins from too much drinking and not enough forgetting. He turned out, to his surprise, to be an old friend of Doc’s.

“Hello, Lew,” Doc said, “haven’t seen you since Shirley Temple was a pup. What can I do you for?”

“I thought I might try going back to work for a change,” Carteret said, too desperate to sound very funny. “What’s new over here?”

Doc told him everything he knew, and he hadn’t chatted with secretaries and read notes upside down on executives’ desks for nothing.

“It looks like we’re going to make a big American cavalcade epic,” Doc concluded.

“Yeah?” Carteret said. “I’m the guy who produced the biggest cavalcade before talking pictures—
Like Father, Like Son.”

“Of course Harry didn’t exactly tell me,” Doc said, “but one of our readers has been reading in the American historical wing of the public library for the past two weeks and three vets from the old soldiers’ home came through here yesterday.”

“That’s the break I need,” Carteret said.

“I’ll take care of it,” Doc said.

He called Judy and made an appointment for him. Carteret only had to wait an hour and fifteen minutes.

“Thanks, old boy,” he said to Doc gratefully as he was called in. “You certainly have a pull around here.”

Five minutes later Carteret came out. His face was red and perspiration was dripping down onto his only clean shirt.

“What did Harry say?” Doc asked.

“Listen,” said Carteret grimly, “he told me you popped out with the studio secret of the year. He warned me that if his idea ever gets out, he’ll run us both out of the industry. I practically bought myself a one-way ticket to starvation.”

Doc had his salary reduced to forty a week after that. But that didn’t stop him from playing his role. Every afternoon, for instance, he dropped in for a spot of tea at the commissary. If any of us office boys were grabbing a cup of coffee we used to dread seeing him because it would mean the end of our service. Doc was the idol of the waitresses. The moment he crossed the threshold the girls would drop everything they were doing and race each other to the door for the privilege of waiting on him. He had a way of looking a girl up and down without making her feel cheap. He knew how to make them laugh, he knew how to charge the air about them with importance. He was sort of like King Midas, only instead of gold, everything he touched became dramatic.