The Celebrity (5 page)

He could hardly wait. But since he had to, he ordered up  a second gin and tonic.

Big Business—what a comfortable phrase it was. Luther Digby took a deep breath and began to pace the room, his chest expanded, his head high. Success was a tonic, a rejuvenator; better than vitamin pills and morning calisthenics and even proper evacuation, it made a man feel fit to face the world. People reacted instantaneously to the aura of Success—bellhops, headwaiters, room clerks, even one’s own wife and children treated one with new deference when one had pulled off a successful coup.

In a way, it
was
his own coup! Had it not been he who had had the vision to sign up a first novel by an unheard-of young college student named Gregory Johns? It had indeed. He himself had sown the seeds of today’s triumph and seen to it that it was not Random House or Scribner or Doubleday, but Digby and Brown, who were the publishers of
The Good World.
There would be those, even in his own firm, who would try to take the credit away, those niggardly enough to ask if he had read
The Good World.
They would conveniently forget that the head of a publishing house could not always find time to read every manuscript that bore its imprint, but he would remind them that in faraway 1930 he had not only read every solitary word of
Partial
—whatever-it-was, but had, in the face of some opposition, authorized a contract and an advance of one hundred dollars.
Eclipse,
that was it,
Partial Eclipse,
some sort of novel about a man who was imprisoned for something or other, just what he couldn’t recall.

And now had come proof, though rather long-deferred, of his editorial judgment and foresight in signing on Gregory Johns. Fifty-two thousand dollars was proof indeed, and if
The Good World
should develop a runaway sale in bookstores, this windfall might reach a
hundred
and fifty-two thousand.

Nor, it suddenly dawned on him, did the possibilities end even there. With that kind of book, anything might happen. It was then that The Question had popped into his mind.

Did the firm have a cut in possible movie rights? Or did it not?

Unhesitatingly he called Long Distance. “Try that Greenwich number again, please. It’s important.”

“I just checked it, sir. Mr. Brown is not in. I’ll try again in twenty minutes.”

“Do that.” He was still affable. Even on a local of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, a man could not remain en route forever. But he would cancel his own dinner appointment and stay put; it would he unkind to let Alan find
him
unavailable. Better to see Chicago’s second-largest book jobber tomorrow and dine right by the telephone.

It was a cozy idea. He would range the menu and treat himself to the things he liked best—this was no occasion for holding oneself down to any medico’s orders about diet and blood pressure. As if any man of fifty-five didn’t run to a bit of a paunch and a touch of blood pressure! He glanced at the mirror opposite and nodded judiciously at what he saw. Compact, that’s what he was; not fat, just compact. And balding, as
Time
put it, not bald. His features were good American features and his mustache, if he said so himself, was distinguished. The distinguished publisher, Luther Digby, among whose personal discoveries is the famous Gregory Johns, author of the Number One Best Seller—

Did
the firm have a share in any of the subsidiary rights beyond the standard fifty-fifty deal on book club and reprints? Or was Gregory Johns’ present contract one of those barbarisms which made publishing a suicidal proposition in these days of murderous costs?

Suddenly he itched to know and to know at once. At Digby and Brown only two kinds of authors got such contracts. One was the author with such sales that he could command anything. The other was the proved failure. Failures could not always be kicked off the list but if there was no reasonable chance that a dime could ever be realized from their magazine rights or dramatic rights or movie rights, why, then, it was only good sense to release any share in those rights. There was no better way to refute meddlers and needlers like the Authors Guild than to have a handful of contracts around which generously let the author keep a full hundred per cent of everything.

Was Gregory Johns
enough
of a failure?

For the first time in a decade Luther Digby reversed his position on this point. He turned once more to the telephone but the first premonition of continuing disaster, chilled him. The Browns were party-goers; sometimes they stayed-over at a hotel in town rather than return to Greenwich.

Luther Digby shuddered and faced reality. A pulse began to beat on his right temple but he ignored it. Who; else might know about the Johns contract? Know
now,
away from the office, away from the files? Jack McIntyre was the firm’s treasurer; he sent out royalty checks; he might know. Ed Barnard was Johns’ editor, he ought to know. And if Jack and Ed both let him down, as Alan was doing, he might even call his secretary, late though it was, and be saved from going mad. Joyce would offer to go up to the office at once and get the answer. Did they or did they not have that movie cut?

“Operator,” Luther Digby shouted, “I have three emergency calls to place.”

An hour crawled by before he thought again of dinner but by then he was too enraged to be hungry. He ordered one more gin and tonic instead. There, he thought now, there, in that third drink was where he had made his mistake. The first two were reasonable, but that next one was not. And whatever others had followed that unreasonable one, they were:
not
either. There had been others. How many others, he did not know.

All he knew was that nobody, not one
of
them, not Alan, not Jack, not Ed, not Joyce, not one single soul had called back to find out how they—how he or she—could be of service to the President of the firm which gave them—which gave him or her—a livelihood and their place—his or her place—in society.

Luther Digby consulted his watch once more, but for the first time found it difficult to translate what he saw there to Eastern Standard Time, the only real time, God’s time. Something eluded him and he could not be positive whether the hand which was pointing to eleven in Chicago would be pointing in New York to twelve or to ten. He gave up New York and thought of the Rockies; when he traveled through Montana and Wyoming, surely he was two hours behind New York? Then if it were only nine in the Rockies by Mountain Time—but something had gone wrong again. He went farther west, to Pacific Time, but at once nothing but Hollywood occurred to him. That brought him back to The Question.

He moaned piteously and fell into a torpid slumber. The telephone rang.

“On your call to—”

“Yes, Operator, yes.”

“One moment, please.” In the mingling of nasal sounds in the receiver, he caught what sounded like “D.A.” This exasperated him unaccountably.

“D.A.? What D.A.? I don’t want any—”

“It’s our code for ‘Doesn’t Answer,’ sir. That Greenwich number doesn’t answer at all now. Whoever took the message before must have left. I’ll try again in twenty minutes, if you like.”

He slammed up the receiver without replying and fell back against his pillows. A thump-thump beat against his eardrums; his blood pressure must be ten thousand over nine thousand. He thought of coronary thrombosis, but without emotion.

The telephone shrilled again.

“Will you accept a collect call from New York? Mr. Gregory—”

“Put him on,” he begged.

“Hello, Mr. Digby,” a voice said patiently. “Your phone’s been busy—I’ve tried it every twenty minutes for more than an hour.”

“Oh, God.” Mr. Digby’s mind suddenly turned to hot pulp and inside that pulp frantic fingers scrabbled around to find the things he’d been prepared, so many hours ago, to say in congratulation and praise. Gregory Johns began to talk quietly of surprise and pleasure. Then at last Mr. Digby spoke.

“Rights,” he said clearly.

“What?”

“Rights.” Silence fell between them. Luther Digby clutched violently at Sobriety and by the grace of necessity got a momentary hold. “That is,
other
rights,” he said, enunciating perfectly. “Dramatic rights or foreign rights or movie rights. What’s our deal with you on all of those?”

There was a pause. “Let me think a minute.” There was a longer pause. “I don’t know. I haven’t any idea.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Digby forlornly.

“But my brother’s right here. He handles things like that for me. Just a minute.” The small clatter of a phone being laid down on a table came to Mr. Digby. Faintly the sounds of many voices came with it, laughter, high spirits, even a snatch of song. People could be carefree, he thought, relaxed, joyous. His throat began to ache. He had a passing conviction that Janet, at the switchboard years ago, had started to say something about a brother of Gregory Johns and that he had interrupted, but this he brushed aside as a fragment of nightmare. If Janet
had
mentioned any brother, he would have asked for his phone number, and perhaps have reached him before this torment had started. By God, if he ever discovered that Janet had willfully withheld—

Gregory Johns said hello again. “I’m sorry, my brother says he’d have to look up my contract before saying anything and it’s in his office downtown.”

To Luther Digby the conversation had become insupportable. Dimly he heard an offer to have the brother call him in the morning but he let it pass. With dignity he said, “Assure you, it’s not of great moment,” and offered something by way of good-bye. He had to close his eyes or he would die; he had to abandon everything and rest; a man could stand only so much torture before blacking out.

He blacked out.

At twenty-minute intervals for the next two hours Chicago Operator Number 25 clanged him back to consciousness with relentless reports of continuing failure on each of his four calls. At last, Luther Digby, in words he was mercifully never to recall, told her what she could do with Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights, East Orange, and the entire sovereign State of Connecticut.

For Thornton Johns, the high moment of the evening, second in importance and pleasure only to that earlier one when Abby had read the telegram aloud, came when Gregory laid down the phone and asked about the terms of his contract.

It was a reminder that he too would play a part in the big doings ahead, an essential part, an exciting part. Later on, Gregory would need a professional literary agent once more, like all authors with large-scale incomes, but tomorrow morning, questions about terms and payments would be handled in
his
office and nobody else’s. Hadn’t Gregory told Digby that he, Thorn would phone Chicago in the morning?

Change, a break in the routine, a sense of being somebody—he had longed for them and now, for a while at least, he was to have them all. It would be as stimulating as a vacation; there was nothing humdrum in talk about fifty-two thousand dollars. He looked at his brother with gratitude.

Even when the time did come for choosing a new agent, Gregory would discuss the matter with him, as he always discussed any business details, and in that direction, too, there were new horizons. Temporary but new. And it was possible that easygoing Gregory might put off so troublesome a decision for several weeks, maybe even months.

Exhilaration raced through. Thorn’s blood. Never had he thought to be so richly repaid for that off hand suggestion, made during one of Gregory’s brief furloughs from the Pentagon Building, the year before the war ended.

“I’ll give things a once-over for you,” he had said when Gregory had told him; about quarreling with Marilyn Laird. “Get all your stuff from her office and let me dig around for a while.”

“Would you, Thorn?”

“Sure. There’s no big rush about it, is there?”

“It might be a lot of trouble. That’s what you pay ten per cent to agents
for.
” He suddenly sounded dispirited. “But I suppose ten per cent of not much wasn’t enough of an inducement to make Miss Laird accurate.”

“If I could get the hang of it, couldn’t you keep your ten per cent? Do you have: to have an agent?”

“I suppose not. Plenty of writers never do.”

“Well, we’ll think about a new agent deal when the time comes.”

It had never come. There was very little mystery to an author’s contract when you got right down to it. Only once had he needed guidance from experts, and he had gone to the same firm that handled Roy Tribble’s: legal business. Jim Hathaway had looked astonished when he said he would pay the fee himself rather than deduct, it from his brother’s small royalties, but it was for himself, really, he had sought counsel, so that he might go on with, his new interest as long as possible, free from worry about possible errors. He hadn’t bothered to tell Gregory he had gone.

And now he was delighted that no serious move toward a new agent had ever been made. Now there would be
real
problems to cope with, and circumstance had found him ready for them. What would the most professional of professional agents have done just now but learnedly mention contracts and stall for time until morning?

Illogically, he thought of Diana. The change which would come over her face tomorrow when he told her! He wouldn’t boast about Gregory, of course, but he would have to sketch her in on what had happened and tell her he would go right on handling the business end, infinitely more complicated though it would be. He would wait until she came in with the letter to Roy Tribble; instead of reaching for his pen to sign it, he would look up from the spread of book contracts and tell her to file the Tribble letter until sometime next week.

“Next week, Mr. Johns?” she would ask, her voice concerned over anything so unusual.

“Yes, more important things are afoot,” he would answer, and then, very casually, he would tell her. And he would be watching her face as he did so; there’d be no cool remoteness in her eyes tomorrow. Five would get anybody fifty on that.

Anticipation bubbled up and once again he looked at Gregory. The kid brother! The unambitious one, the failure! Now he was a big-money author, somebody whose work all sorts of people, hundreds of thousands of people, not just a few high-brows but real
people,
would read and respect and argue about.