The Englishman's Boy (15 page)

“Not Fitz.”

“Who then?”

“Chance.”

There’s a pause. The line hums in my ear. “Harry, have you been taking your quinine? I believe your malaria’s acting up. What interesting hallucinations it produces.”

“Don’t believe me then.”

But she does. “You? Working for the great man? You’ve actually been to his office?”

“His house.” Despite myself, I’m beginning to revel in my glory.

“In the hills?”

“That’s right.”

“Up there on Mount Olympus? My curiosity is whetted. Details, Harry. Details. Describe, if you would be so good.”

“It’s just a house.”

“There are no houses up there. Only works of art. Tell me, does he have a piece of the Parthenon in it? Like Mr. Valentino?” Deprecating the taste of the Hollywood aristocracy is one of Rachel Gold’s favourite pastimes. “Is it foundering under a great weight of Louis Quinze furniture and Sheraton chairs? Does he have dozens and dozens of Fabergé eggs? And what does he serve them with? Did you hear the latest? One of our leading ladies was recently complaining that the caviar she bought smelled like fish. Chaplin said, ‘What did you expect? Because it was eggs, it would smell like chicken?’ ”

I laugh. “No, Chance’s house is nothing like that. He seems to live in the few rooms that Adilman decorated before he sold it to him. It’s mostly empty.”

“Well, we can’t take the measure of the man from that, can we? Next and most pertinent question. Houseboy or butler? Remember when Mickey Neilan got the Oriental houseboy and you weren’t anyone unless you had a Japanese or Filipino flunky? But now the pendulum seems to be swinging. Genuine English butlers are all the rage. They’re better at teaching you what fork to use. I’ve heard you can’t get a booking on an ocean liner – the transatlantic traffic in Jeeveses
is filling all the cabins. Rumour is, they’re even stacking all those stiff, English pricks like cordwood in the holds to fill the demand. So which side of the question does Chance come down on in the momentous domestic question, East or West?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“And you call yourself an intimate of the Great One. Fie, fie.”

“I never called myself anything. You did.”

Rachel changes gears, abruptly. “So what’s the picture, Harry?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Big secret?”

“You might call it that.”

“So why you? How come you’re privy to the big secret?”

I’m tempted to answer: intuition. But I don’t. “You’d have to ask Mr. Chance.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Rachel says. “You’re not a scenarist, you’re a title-writer.”

That stings. “Maybe somebody thinks I’m capable of more.”

“No, Harry,” says Rachel with great seriousness. “You’re a title-writer. And for that you can be thankful.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s my secret.” She pauses. “Come back soon, Harry. I miss you.”

“All right,” I say. Rachel hangs up.

I miss her, too. But not in the way she misses me. There’s no point to the way I miss her.

Shortly after Rachel leaves the line, the phone rings again. It’s Chance. Unequivocally delighted with my results. We must mark the occasion with a small celebration, a late-night buffet. Could I drop by the house about eleven tonight?

Chance greets me at the door and, offering his warmest congratulations on my success, leads me through his stark mansion. After all the barrenness, the dining room comes as an anomalous relief with its high coffered ceiling and walls of dark wood, its tapestries, its long trestle table floating islands of candles, serving dishes, wine coolers,
bouquets of freshly cut flowers on a sea of starched white linen, its fire of logs in a fieldstone fireplace.

“This was as far as Mr. Adilman got in decorating his house before I purchased it,” says Chance, guiding me around the room. “The table is reputedly thirteenth-century English.” He raps it with his knuckles before he directs my attention to the walls. “Mr. Adilman was particularly proud of these Flemish tapestries which he acquired the year before war broke out in Europe. The château in which they had hung for three centuries was destroyed by German shelling in 1914 – like the medieval library of Louvain, he was fond of reminding everyone. To hear him talk, his purchase of these works of art was an act of clairvoyance and disinterested philanthropy. He was extremely disappointed when I did not dicker over the price of the furnishings, item by item. Apparently, he now entertains dinner guests with my naivete, laughing that he turned his Flemish rags over at a hundred per cent profit.” Chance ponders the tapestries for several moments, then says, “Some day I will pull them off the walls and let Fitz wipe his boots on them.”

I am examining one of the scenes depicted on the tapestries when he utters this bleak statement. A wild pig bristling with spears is in its death throes, red embroidery threads trace showers of blood. Impassively viewing its agony, a noble sits on a white horse, while peasants armed with hunting spears and billhooks crowd around his charger’s flanks, apparently cowering in fear of the tusks of the boar.

Chance lays an arm over my shoulder and sets us moving toward the table. I see it is laid with two places. I ask whether Mr. Fitzsimmons will be joining us tonight.

“No, Fitz would be bored with our conversation. Don’t misunderstand me when I say this – because no man ever had a more stalwart friend than I have had in Fitz – but his mind is not tuned to abstractions. ‘The Hermit of Hollywood’ ” – he puts the words in self-deprecating quotation marks – “sometimes finds his isolation heavy. A little intelligent conversation centred upon the higher realms is always welcome.”

An extraordinarily handsome young Oriental who bears a strong
resemblance to the actor Sessue Hayakawa pushes a trolley loaded with food into the room.

“Ah, Yukio,” exclaims Chance. “This looks very good, splendid.”

We seat ourselves and Yukio begins to deftly lay dishes of shrimp, smoked salmon, oysters on the half-shell, salad, sliced roast beef, warm rolls and butter. Chance lifts his eyebrows, a signal he is about to impart a confidence. “You need not worry about Yukio,” he says. “His English is very poor, just the rudiments of housekeeping pidgin.” Chance points to the roast beef and says loudly, “Roasty beefy? Top good roasty beefy?” Yukio smiles a beautiful smile and nods energetically. “You need not fear that anything you say in front of Yukio will ever leave this room,” Chance assures me.

I am about to tell Chance that such a fear had never crossed my mind when a champagne cork pops and Yukio is filling our glasses. Chance raises his in a toast. “To an enterprise well and truly launched. Thanks to you, Harry.” From his chair, he salutes me with a stiff, truncated bow.

We drink. Maybe it’s just the first flush of success, but I feel the need to emphasize the difficulty of finding Shorty McAdoo. Eyes modestly fastened on the bubbles spurting in my glass, I say, “Well, Mr. Chance, I won’t pretend it was easy. A bit like locating a needle in a haystack. I know Fitzsimmons was losing patience with me but I really don’t believe he understood …” I look up; my voice trails away to nothing.

Chance isn’t listening to me. He’s snatching up platters and sweeping food onto his plate, one dish following another with an assembly-line efficiency fit to gladden the heart of Henry Ford. Now my own voice has fallen quiet, I am aware of the frantic scraping of cutlery on china, the muffled thud of discarded plates dropping on the linen tablecloth. Chance’s nose is almost in his food, the silence broken only by the crackle of rolls tearing apart in his hands, the soft whistle and pant of his breath as he stuffs his mouth, the clatter of his fork and knife. His face is beginning to glisten with sweat; his bright blue eyes moistly bulge as he chews.

There is nothing to do but eat, but my eyes keep sneakily rising
from my dinnerware and snatching glances at my boss. All at once, he primly crosses his knife and fork on his plate. It’s as if a machine had finished eating. Yukio whisks it away. I signal the houseboy to take my plate, too. The firelight pulses on the walls, dances on the silverware and crystal. Chance sits completely still, his eyes fixed where his plate has lain, face as blank as the spot he regards. Behind him, an impassive Yukio stands at attention in starched white coat, the only movement in his face the reflected play of the flames leaping and crackling on the fire irons. When Chance finally does lift his eyes to me, there is scarcely a glimmer of recognition in them. His absent-minded smile is the smile of someone politely easing his way by a stranger in the crowded aisle of a trolley car. “The years of study that lie behind this picture,” he says.

A log sinks in the fireplace with a sputter of sparks. I shift uncomfortably in my chair, pick up my napkin, lay it down again. I say, “Your study of Griffith?”

My question seems to pull him back a little from wherever he has drifted. He begins to jab the linen tablecloth with the tines of a dessert fork. “No, not just Griffith,” he says. “Griffith is only one piece of the puzzle. A small piece.” His habitual fluency seems to return. “You might say that for ten years I searched for the pieces to the picture, trying this and trying that – history, sociology, economics, philosophy – looking for useful fragments here and there, testing and discarding. There were many roadblocks; I awoke in many dark woods.” He thinks for a moment, sips his champagne. “It is not easy to grope your way to first principles. It is not easy to forsake personal prejudices for the truth. For instance, even as a small boy I loathed my father. His materialism repelled me. But with time, I came to see that he was merely the unconscious and unwitting servant of the chief tendency of the nineteenth century – the drive to increase and bind together material forces. Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, their vaunted independence and initiative was all really an illusion, and they the unconscious agents of what the Germans call the
Zeitgeist –
the spirit of the age. These men were simply tools of an evolutionary process of
which they were no more conscious than the lowest life form is of its role in the process of biological evolution. And realizing this, I came to pity my father, pitied his blind, mole-like industry, pitied him most because he deluded himself he was captain of his own fate. The growth of great industrial and business trusts, the unification of Italy and of Germany, the war we fought in this country to prevent the disintegration of the Union, the growth of the European empires were all manifestations of the same urge, the urge to combine and consolidate material forces.

“The more I meditated upon my father’s life the more I came to understand that every man is the servant of historical forces – that no man can deny the spirit of his age, any more than a fish can renounce the water for the land. But the fishes which know the currents, the pools, and the eddies of the stream they inhabit, these are the fishes who increase their chances of survival. And so do the men who familiarize themselves with the currents of the age to which they are confined. That I was determined to do.”

Chance hesitates briefly, a lecturer marshalling his forces for the next onslaught upon the topic. I wait, perplexed. I have no idea what this “spirit of the age” talk is all about. It sounds a bit like the spiritualist, table-knocking-to-get-in-touch-with-the-dearly-departed, Madame Blavatsky, Hindu swami bullshit which finds such a warm welcome in Hollywood. But I’m not sure. Somehow this is different.

“Which brings me to the present,” he says. “Before and after the war I travelled extensively in Europe. It was evident to me that the war had unravelled the nineteenth century and everything it stood for. But America has not realized this. In America, business continues as usual. One year of war was not enough to teach us the stern lessons learned by Europe. America’s supremacy in the field of industrial production has made her blind to the facts. The war racked Europe with a creative suffering, the travails of a hard and agonizing birth, the parturition of a quickening spirit. While bigger business, bigger armies, more coal, more steel gave the advantages necessary for survival in the nineteenth century, these alone will not be sufficient for
success in the new century. In the twentieth century, survival can only be insured by a consolidation of
spiritual
forces.” Chance leans forward eagerly in his chair as he delivers this remarkable statement.

Eccentricity is the privilege of rich men. They can afford it. I set my glass down carefully on the table. “Spiritual forces, Mr. Chance? I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the League of Nations? Ethical principles ruling the conduct of states?”

He smiles condescendingly. “No, Harry, the League of Nations is the furthest thing from my mind – Voltaire arguing that primitive impulses and bloodlust can be curbed by an appeal to reason. When I speak of spiritual forces, I am speaking of that side of man which the nineteenth century denied because of its worship of reason and science.”

“What side would that be?”

“Intuition, the life force, what Bergson calls the
élan vital
, the irrational. The night world of visions and fantasies and the waking world of fructifying daydreams. The lost primitive. Sudden insight, inspiration, impulse, imagination.
Instinct
, Harry! The flexing, the liberation of the will. The rich, chaotic, creative stew of the unconscious! But I speak only words, Harry, bare nouns, mere shadows of rich and complex impulses which words fail to properly describe.” He smiles, as if realizing he is getting too carried away, speaks more quietly. “I don’t want you to mistake my meaning, Harry. I am
not
suggesting we turn our back on the benefits science has conferred. Far from it. The question is not the rejection of technological and material innovations; the question is whether we Americans will summon up our as yet unawakened spiritual forces and employ them for proper ends.”

“What ends are these, Mr. Chance?”

Chance is not ready to answer my question. He leans back in his chair, relaxing in the warmth of a memory. “Can I describe for you one of the most momentous events in my life, Harry? It occurred in August of 1907 when I bought my first ticket to a nickelodeon. Do you remember what nickelodeons were like in those days? A couple of hundred folding chairs in a failed grocery store, pool room, bankrupt
hardware store. Filled with poor immigrants – Irishmen, Poles, Russians, Scandinavians, Italians. Cheap entertainment for a nickel. The foreigners loved the new picture stories because you didn’t have to be able to speak English to understand them, pictures told the tale. The nickelodeons had a bad reputation among respectable people; they were rumoured to be dens of vice; people of my background spoke sneeringly of them as amusement for idiots. But one afternoon on a visit to New York my curiosity got the better of me; I paid my nickel and took my seat among the crowd in the dark. The stench was unbelievable! Week-old sweat, unwashed underpants, a cloud of garlic. Sickening. When the picture began, I was convinced it was nothing but idiotic tomfoolery, mind-numbing sentiment, crapulous melodrama. But then something happened, Harry. The hall was mesmerized, and I do not use the word loosely. They were moved. They wept over innocence outraged, they blazed with hatred for the unrepenting wicked. You recall what happened to Erich von Strpheim after playing so many evil Prussians during the war? It wasn’t safe for him to go out in the streets. When he was recognized, stones were thrown at his automobile. It was no different that afternoon. If the villain had appeared in the flesh, they would have torn him to pieces, limb from bleeding limb.